"Is this another sorting algorithm?", you might think.
Well in that case, you are wrong.
This is a server-side tool for organizing your emails and keeping your inbox clean.
You may already use filters in your mail client to automatically sort emails into folders based on certain criteria.
This has a couple of drawbacks. Here are the two most prominent ones:
- This approach requires you to open a mail client before the email can be sorted.
- In the current day and age, you probably check your email on more than one device. Not mail clients on mobile devices support creating rules. It is also hard to synchronize all the rules between your different mail clients.
This tool uses MailKit, an awesome .NET library for all email-related stuff, and .NET 6.
Do you need to install .NET 6 to be able to run this tool? No.
Just download the native binary for your operating system and you're good to go.
Already have .NET 6 installed on the target machine? Even better. Just download the non-native binary and enjoy the smaller file size ;)
This tool works by connecting to an IMAP server, going through all the messages in your inbox, checking if they match some criteria and if so, move that message to a folder.
The most common usage will probably be to run this tool via a cronjob at certain intervals.
Here's an example usage:
./MailSort -h imap.gmail.com -u [email protected] -p very_secure -c /path/to/config/file.json
or for more clarity
./MailSort --host imap.gmail.com --username [email protected] --password very_secure --config /path/to/config/file.json
These are the mandatory arguments. There are a few more, run ./MailSort --help to get an overview of all the options.
Please make sure you have the correct credentials to authenticate with the IMAP server. For example, Gmail users will no be able to authenticate with their Google password, they will need to generate and supply an application-specific password.
The config file is a JSON file where you define your rules. Here's an example:
[
{
"id": "rule1",
"haystack": "subject",
"matchingMethod": "equals",
"needle": "Winner!",
"targetFolder": "Spam",
"combineWith": "rule2",
"combinationMethod": "logicalAnd"
},
{
"id": "rule2",
"isCombinationRule": true,
"haystack": "body",
"matchingMethod": "containsIgnoreCase",
"needle": "You have won!"
},
{
"id": "rule3",
"haystack": "body",
"matchingMethod": "contains",
"needle": "Trigger",
"targetFolder": "Test"
}
]Let's go through the fields.
id: Can be any string and can also be omitted. Only useful when wanting to refer to the rule in another rule.
haystack: The part of the email to search through. Possible values: subject, body, cc, bcc, sender, recipients, recipientsAndCc, recipientsAndBcc, ccAndBcc, recipientsAndCcAndBcc, date (yyyy-MM-dd). When using a haystack which combines two attributes (e.g. recipientsAndCc), they will be chained together using a comma and a following space and then checked against your needle. Thus you should probably only use these methods with the contains or containsIgnoreCase matchingMethod.
Fields like sender are sometimes represented in the typical IMAP format ("Name" [email protected]), so you might want to use the contains matchingMethod with these emails.
matchingMethod: The type of check to perform. Should the subject exactly match something, or is it enough if it contains it? Possible values: contains, equals, containsIgnoreCase, equalsIgnoreCase, greaterThanOrEqual. greaterThanOrEqual can currently only be used in combination with the needle date.
needle: The phrase to search for in the haystack.
targetFolder: The folder to move the email to if it matches the criteria of the rule. Subfolders are currently not supported, but feel free to open a PR!
combineWith: Combine this rule with another rule (this is where the id comes into play). That way you can chain multiple rules to fine tune your sorting.
combinationMethod: How to logically combine the two rules. Possible values: logicalAnd, logicalOr.
isCombinationRule: Specifies that this rule is only used in combination with another rule which references this one. This means you can omit the targetFolder.
Once an email matches a rule, the email gets moved and the rest of the rules do not get evaluated, so the order of the rules may be important.
This project uses open source software, each subject to their own license.
MIT License
Copyright (C) 2013-2020 .NET Foundation and Contributors
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of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
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copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
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all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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