GNU Mailutils
	General-Purpose Mail Package	Official GNU Software

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5.7.1 Built-in Actions

The GNU libmu_sieve supports the following built-in actions:

• stop
• keep
• discard
• fileinto
• reject
• redirect

Among them the first three actions do not need to be explicitly required by a require statement, while the others do.

These actions are described in detail below.

Action: stop

The stop action ends all processing. If no actions have been executed, then the keep action is taken.

Action: keep

The effect of this action is to preserve the current message in the mailbox. This action is executed if no other action has been executed.

Action: discard

Discard silently throws away the current message. No notification is returned to the sender, the message is deleted from the mailbox.

Example:

if header :contains ["from"] ["idiot@example.edu"]
  {
    discard;
  }

Action: fileinto [:permissions mode] folder

Required arguments:

folder

A string representing the folder name

Tagged arguments:

:permissions mode

Specifies the permissions to use, if the mailbox is created.

The fileinto action delivers the message into the specified folder. If the folder is local, it is created using permissions ‘0600’, for regular files, and ‘0700’ for directories. This default can be changed by using the :permissions tag. Its argument is a mode specification, similar to that used by chmod shell utility. It is a list of permissions settings separated by commas. Each setting begins with one of the following letters:

g

Set permissions for the users in the file group.

o

Set permissions for users not in the file’s group.

This letter must be followed by either ‘+’ or ‘=’ and the list of permissions to be set. This latter list is a string containing any one or both of the following characters:

r

Grant permission to read.

w

Grant permission to write.

For example, the following instruction creates the mailbox ~/shared which will be world readable and writable for the group:

  fileinto :permissions "g=rw,o=r" "~/shared"

Notice that:

1. The :permissions setting are affected by the current umask value.
2. Only r and w permissions can be set, since other permissions do not seem to be useful for mailboxes. However, for mailboxes that have a directory structure (such as maildir and MH), any settings in ‘g’ and ‘o’ sets imply setting the executable bit.
3. Owner’s permissions cannot be set. The owner always has all permissions on the mailbox he created.
4. The :permissions settings apply only to local mailboxes. They are ignored for remote mailboxes.

Action: reject reason

The optional reject action refuses delivery of a message by sending back a message delivery notification to the sender. It resends the message to the sender, wrapping it in a “reject” form, noting that it was rejected by the recipient. The required argument reason is a string specifying the reason for rejecting the message.

Example:

If the message contained

Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:06:31 -0800 (PST)
From: coyote@desert.example.org
To: roadrunner@acme.example.com
Subject: I have a present for you

I've got some great birdseed over here at my place.
Want to buy it?

and the user’s script contained:

if header :contains "from" "coyote@desert.example.org"
  {
    reject "I am not taking mail from you, and I don't want
            your birdseed, either!";
  }

then the original sender <coyote@desert.example.org> would receive the following notification:

To: <coyote@desert.example.org>
X-Authentication-Warning: roadrunner set sender using -f flag
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
MIME-Version: 1.0
----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
The original message was received at
Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:07:15 -0800 from
coyote@desert.example.org.
Message was refused by recipient's mail filtering program.
Reason given was as follows:

I am not taking mail from you, and I don't want your
birdseed, either!

----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
Content-Type: message/delivery-status

Reporting-UA: sieve; GNU Mailutils 0.1.3
Arrival-Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:07:15 -0800
Final-Recipient: RFC822; roadrunner@acme.example.com
Action: deleted
Disposition: automatic-action/MDN-sent-automatically;deleted
Last-Attempt-Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:07:15 -0800

----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
Content-Type: message/rfc822

From: coyote@desert.example.org
To: roadrunner@acme.example.com
Subject: I have a present for you

I've got some great birdseed over here at my place.
Want to buy it?
----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0

If the reason argument is rather long, the common approach is to use the combination of the text: and #include keywords, e.g.:

if header :mime :matches "Content-Type"
          [ "*application/msword;*", "*audio/x-midi*" ]
  {
    reject text:
#include "nomsword.txt"
    .
    ;
  }

Action: redirect address

The redirect action is used to send the message to another user at a supplied address, as a mail forwarding feature does. This action makes no changes to the message body or existing headers, but it may add new headers. It also modifies the envelope recipient.

The redirect command performs an MTA-style “forward” — that is, what you get from a .forward file using sendmail under UNIX. The address on the SMTP envelope is replaced with the one on the redirect command and the message is sent back out. Notice, that it differs from the MUA-style forward, which creates a new message with a different sender and message ID, wrapping the old message in a new one.