Sieve script not working

[Willem Offermans]

Dear Andrea and Cyrus friends,

I remember from a long time ago, that documentation with respect to sieve was sparse.
It took me quite some time to set things up and to handle sieve back then. But even now
I wouldn’t know how to debug the sieve process. Most of the things in the background of the
sieve process are still mysterious to me. But it works very well from a perspective from a user.
Since then, it didn’t change for the better, I’m afraid.

It can happen with software development: nice and excellent code has been developed,
but the program is almost not useable or is only partly used with respect to its power, because of lack of 
documentation. Usually an excellent developer is a poor documenter. It is very time consuming and oh so boring to write
good documentation…. To a great frustration of the users … And this is not a judgement, I can understand both sides.

What can help in such a situation, is to dig into the original code.
If you are extremely lucky, the developer commented its code and you can follow, read and/or puzzle on
what is going on. It might give you hints on how to debug.
Also go through the original code distribution. Sometimes it includes ReadMe’s or examples, which can give you hints.
 
If you find something useful, or if you even can solve your problem, then please document it and try to get the documentation 
into the source distribution, or at least into the mailing list, so that others can benefit from it.

The following is illustrative of what I mean:

<snip>
$ ll /usr/local/cyrus/bin/*ieve*
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  uarch 1191104 Nov  7  2016 /usr/local/cyrus/bin/sievec
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  uarch 1182048 Nov  7  2016 /usr/local/cyrus/bin/sieved
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  uarch 1512864 Nov  7  2016 /usr/local/cyrus/bin/compile_sieve
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  uarch 1544432 Nov  7  2016 /usr/local/cyrus/bin/timsieved
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  uarch    4976 Nov  7  2016 /usr/local/cyrus/bin/masssievec
$ man sievec
No manual entry for sievec
$ man sieved
No manual entry for sieved
$ man compile_sieve
No manual entry for compile_sieve
$ man masssievec
No manual entry for masssievec
$ man timsieved
TIMSIEVED(8)                                                      TIMSIEVED(8)



 *

NAME
       timsieved - CMU hack for getting sieve scripts onto the server

SYNOPSIS
       timsieved [ -C config-file ]

DESCRIPTION
       timsieved  is a server that allows users to remotely manage their sieve
       scripts kept on the server.  It accepts commands on its standard  input
       and  responds  on  its standard output. It MUST be invoked by master(8)
       with those descriptors attached to a remote client connection.

       Cyrus admins that authenticate and authorize as themselves (e.g.  don't
       proxy) manage global scripts.

       Timsieved reads its configuration options out of the imapd.conf(5) file
       unless specified otherwise by -C.


OPTIONS
       -C config-file
              Read configuration options from config-file.

FILES
       /etc/imapd.conf

SEE ALSO
       imapd.conf(5), master(8)



CMU                              Project Cyrus                    TIMSIEVED(8)

</snip>

man <program> is usually the starting point of your journey.  



Wiel Offermans
Willem at Offermans.Rompen.nl




> On 1 Mar 2019, at 11:16, Andrea Venturoli <ml at netfence.it> wrote:
> 
> On 3/1/19 11:01 AM, Merlin Hartley wrote:
>> Is this a shared mailbox?
> 
> No.
> 
> 
> 
>> Have you actually compiled the script or just
>> put the plain text there? Did you install the file by hand or use something like timsieved?
> 
> I install the scripts via sieveshell.
> 
> 
> 
>> You haven’t really given us much to go on…
> 
> Unfortunately, I really don't know which information I should post.
> My original question was if I could enable some logs to see what was going on.
> If there is other info that can be useful to solve this problem, I'm willing to report it.
> 
> 
> 
> bye & Thanks
> 	av.
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