anyone know of a mail client that can filter on IMAP msg body?

[Roger Oberholtzer]

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 15:07 -0500, Net Llama! wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2006, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 13:00 -0500, Net Llama! wrote:
> >> I'm getting drowned at work with nearly 5000 (yes, 5000) new emails each
> >> day.  Its reached the point of being ridiculous, and I need to find an
> >> email client that can reliably filter based on the content of the body of
> >> the messages (rather than just the headers).  The added twist is that this
> >> needs to work for an IMAP server (rather than POP).  Thunderbird claims to
> >> be able to do this, yet it flat out doesn't work (and others have reported
> >> similar problems).
> >>
> >> Is anyone actually getting this to work (rather than theoretically
> >> thinking it might work) with any mail client?
> >
> > I use evolution, which runs a spam filter. I think the specific one to
> > use is set in gnome's config. I don't use gnome, but this was rather
> > painless to set up IIRC. The gottcha is that it only does this when it
> > is running. It has a 'learn' and 'unlearn' feature. The machine I had
> > this running on did pretty good. Far better than getting them all. It
> > produced only false negatives, which wasn't too bad.
> 
> The thing is that I'm not trying to get rid of spam, i'm just trying to 
> filter the 98% of the emails that i have no interest in ever reading from 
> the 2% that I absolutely must read.  Outside of spam filtering does it 
> actually provide functionality for IMAP message body filtering based on 
> predefined rules?

Yes. 

> I had considered using evolution in the past, but everything that i'd read 
> about it says that its bloated, buggy & slow.  Has it been reliable for 
> you?

I have used it for years. I have an IMAP server at work that I access
from evolution there, on my laptop and from at home. Pop works as well.
My wife uses it to access MS mail from work. Until my daughter jumped
ship to gmail, she used it as well. From the age of 8 or so. I have
plans to set up my wife's parents with a Linux system, and they will be
using evolution.

Evolution also has virtual folders. So you can have different views into
your mail. I often get mail from certain users that I want to organize
both by the user and by the topic. Virtual folders allow this. Call it
bloat. So are ??? in the local alphabet :)

In fact, I now use procmail to sort my mail as it arrives, putting it in
imap folders as needed. Thus I do not need to set up the rules in all
e-mail clients. It wasn't that any specific client was bad. I just did
not like to keep setting all of them up. I personally would go that
route over using any e-mail client for sorting/filtering. Depends on
your needs.

--
Roger Oberholtzer