Staffmail Differences

There are some noteable differences between our current mail.inf.ed.ac.uk and staffmail.ed.ac.uk services, we'll list them here.

Filtering

We use procmail, staffmail users Sieve. You can't (currently) filter on matches in the body of a message. Neither of these should be a particular issue to most of our users.

IMAP Connections

We don't enforce secure IMAP connections(!), staffmail does. This is a good thing.

Plussed email address

staffmail automatically files to detail, eg neilb+detail@staffmail if the folder detail exists. See Plussed Addresses, below, for more detail.

Cross folder searching

You can't search across mail folders for a text string, unless your mailer explicitly opens each of your folders and searches within them for you. For example this feature does not work in pine, but you can if you use the www.staffmail.ed.ac.uk web interface.

INBOX ACL stickyness

If you add someone to the ACL for your INBOX, then that ACL is automatically applied to any new mail folders that you then create. If you then remove that someone from your INBOX ACL, it does not remove the ACL entries for that someone from the mail folders created during that time.

This "feature" isn't/wasn't mentioned in the staffmail docs on the subject: http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/email/webmail/options-imp-share.html

Sender needs to be a valid @inf address

The IS mail machines implement various anti-spam measures, one of which is that it will not accept mail apparently from bogus @inf.ed.ac.uk addresses. So if any automated processes (bugzilla for example) sends mail as bugzilla-daemon@inf, but mail to bugzilla-daemon@inf would bounce, then staffmail will not accept the mail. So it is important that any automated mail can be replied to, this may mean reconfiguring the headers of the outgoing mail, or setting up a mailbox/alias to accept mail @inf.

Duplicate messages to a folder are not delivered

If staffmail detects that a message about to be filed into a folder has the same message id as a message already in that folder (and less than three days old), then it will not deliver that additional copy of the email (as it should be the same message). This is to avoid duplicate messages ending up in a folder. Note that the same message arriving to you via different routes could be delivered multiple times if you file each copy into a different folder.

Plussed addresses

You can filter on the To: or Cc: headers with the plussed address and save to a folder or take some other action. If not filtered, then the message will be subject to Cyrus's default processing of plussed addresses:

• Processing "username+detail@local-domain", if "detail" specifies a folder in "username"s account, and that folder's ACL gives "p" rights to the user called "anyone", then the message will be delivered to that folder.
• Otherwise, the message is delivered to "username"s INBOX.

The two functionalities are somewhat different. Using the filters, the filtering action appears explicitly in the filter rules list, which makes things easier to keep track of. On the other hand, you need seperate rules for filtering on From: and Cc:. If the recipient does not appear in these headers then no filtering is done.

Using Cyrus's native support for plussed addresses, you do not see anything in your filter rules list. You need to go and look at your folder ACLs to see which folders give "p" rights to "anyone". On the other hand, it operates on the envelope sender address rather than any header address, so does not require the plussed address to appear in any header, and does not require multiple rules to cover all the possibilities. Also note that the native "plussedness" of an email is lost when it is forwarded from user+foo@inf to user@staffmail. It can be preserved if you ask us to forward specific plussed addresses, ie so we can forward user+foo@inf to user+foo@staffmail.