Experience with > 32K Sieve scripts?

Rob Carter rob at duke.edu
Thu May 12 16:38:45 EDT 2005


I think it's a combination of primarily two things -- users setting up 
long-ish vacation messages and doing (arguably inelegant) things to 
black/whitelist addresses.

In the cases I've seen so far, a user will either have an explicit list of a 
few hundred email addresses from which they want all mail to be discarded or a 
list of 40-50 globbed domains they want to discard mail from coupled with a 
list of a few hundred "whitelisted" specific addresses.  That's invariably in 
addition to "if (match) {discard;}" blocks matching on the spam analysis 
headers we add to inbound messages -- I haven't had a chance to analyze how 
much actual *effect* the black/whitelisting may be having, but I suspect a lot 
of it is actually superfluous, since most of what they're blacklisting is 
probably also being flagged by our spam detectors.

It's made worse, I think, by the way that our Autosieve user interface adds 
comments to the script when it's editied, and compounded by users who do a lot of:

	if (a) {
		blah
	}
	if (b) {
		blah
	}

rather than:

	if (a || b) {
		blah
	}

but at this point, weaning the folks who use it a lot off the former model is 
more of a long-term solution -- lifting the size limit a bit is a shorter-term 
stopgap.  Fortunately, 99% of our users who use sieve have scripts down in the 
1-2K range -- it's just that the handful with large scripts are...vocal... :-) 
  For the most part, the large scripts aren't complex -- just overly verbose 
and heavily commented...

--Thanx,
--Rob--

Ken Murchison wrote:

> I don't see where a 64k limit would be a problem, but >32k is a pretty 
> big script.  What exactly is causing the size to be so large?
> 
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