Debugging Sieve scripts

[Kevin M. Myer]

Hello,

I have a problem that periodically crops up, then usually goes away and I never
get around to diagnosing the root cause of it.  It seems to be triggered
whenever I set a vacation/out of office message.  When I enable a vacation
message, messages that would normally be filed into folders start appearing in
my INBOX.  It becomes annoying quickly when you come back and have to sort
through 300+ messages to find the things you want to see (other mail is list
mail and system log messages).  Normally, disabling the vacation notification
solves the problem but this time it didn't.

What I find even stranger is there appears to be no rhyme or reason for letting
one message be filtered and another not.  I'm getting a lot of virus
notifications for the latest version of the Bagle worm.  The majority of these
are filed into my virus folder.  A few end up in my INBOX.  All should be
caught by the same sieve script but aren't.  Same with list mail and system log
messages.  The bulk are filtered properly but a few sneak through into my
INBOX.  The messages that come through appear to be identical in nature to the
messages that are filed.  It appears as if Sieve gets periodicaly overwhelmed,
and just gives up on filtering for short periods of time.

I haven't been able to rule out that there's a bug in the program that I use to
generate the scripts (Ingo 1.0.1 from the Horde project).  So I'm wondering if
there is a way I can take a message that made it by Sieve, and somehow run
Sieve in test mode, in much the same manner you can test ClamAV or
SpammAssassin on a message and have it report back what the results are for a
single message.  I'd like to have it run through my sieve script, show me the
matches and then tell me what it would have done with the message.

Short of there being a bug in the script itself, does anyone else have any ideas
why Sieve behaves erratically, apparently triggered by turning vacation notices
on, and then will eventually clear itself up?

Thanks,
Kevin



-- 
Kevin M. Myer
Senior Systems Administrator
Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13
(717) 560-6140

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