Dovecot Sieve and Junk Mail

This is a useful addition to Dovecot and will pass messages marked as spam directly into a Junk mail folder.

Trouble is when you’re working with the Outlook IMAP client it structures folders a little differently. So in order to put it into the correct folder a few changes to the Dovecot namespace is required. Specifically MS uses a dot in the folder name eg. “.Junk E-mail” and “.Trash” So to cater for this here’s the changes made to activate dovecot-sieve and the mailbox folder names.

Changes in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-mailbox.conf

mailbox ".Junk E-mail" {
  special_use = \Junk
}
mailbox ".Trash" {
  special_use = \Trash
}

Changes in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/90-sieve.conf

plugin {
  sieve = ~/.dovecot.sieve
  sieve_dir = ~/sieve
  sieve_global_dir = /var/lib/dovecot/sieve/global/
  sieve_global_path = /var/lib/dovecot/sieve/default.sieve
}

Enable the sieve plugin by adding it into the lda config.

Changes in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/15-lda.conf

protocol lda {
  # Space separated list of plugins to load (default is global mail_plugins).
  #mail_plugins = $mail_plugins
  mail_plugins = $mail_plugins sieve
}

Create the sieve rule file to actually pass the messages to Junk if they are spam. Note the deliberate missing “.” in the fileinto line.

File: /var/lib/dovecot/sieve/default.sieve

require "fileinto";
  if exists "X-Spam-Flag" {
          if header :contains "X-Spam-Flag" "NO" {
          } else {
          fileinto "Junk E-mail";
          stop;
          }
  }

Getting it to run is now a little bit of an exercise. The sieve file needs to be compiled and the vmail user/group needs to have access to the path or it won’t run. So make sure you chgrp/chmod the /var/lib/dovecot path and subfolders as necessary for the vmail user/group.

Compile the sieve using

# sievec /var/lib/dovecot/sieve/default.sieve