I’ve been trying out the email client on my phone again, an E61. The push email support isn’t fantastic. Even with firmware v3 I get it to hang up pretty frequently and require me to restart the client, sometimes restart the phone. But I wanted to try out using it at least for the little emails here and there that I can jam into 5 minutes of free time while away from my laptop. Problem: I send all sorts of crap to myself through email. I have subversion checkin notifications, forum reply notices, monitoring system warnings and errors. My normal email inbox is too verbose of a stream to be useful on my phone. The constant interruptions are annoying, but I don’t want to pull my email either, I want it sitting there and ready for me to use. My inbox also frequently tops 500 messages when I have a big project that sucks up time and I can’t keep tending to my messages. I wanted something that was a little more adaptable and tunable. This is what I’m trying out:
- I’ve created a distinct email box on my server for my mobile client. That box gets a subset of messages forwarded to it (anything from admob.com that isn’t one of the bots or script, and isn’t a subversion checkin). The outbound mailbox is still my primary address, I just pull from a different source. The client on the E61 groks different send and receive config, so no problem.
- I installed the Courier::Filter modules on my server and hacked up a new module to watch outbound traffic, traffic that I send through my own SMTP server is passed as normal but the To: addresses are recorded in a text file, called my “sentto” file.
- The maildrop config for my primary account also checks to see if an email address is in my “sentto” list for the last two days. If it sees an inbound message from someone I sent to, it sends the message to my mobile inbox as well. I also have a whitelisted group of folks this happens for all the time apart from my general admob.com allow.
- There’s a cron job running cleanup-maildir on the mobile inbox and cleaning up anything older than two days, so I don’t have to manually go in and delete stuff out of that mobile cache of messages.
We’ll see how that works out. I was thinking about having the outbound filters pick up commands in messages sent to a virtual address to manipulate the config on the server, but I think I want to try to make all the “commands” implicit in what I do instead of explicit requests. It’s worked pretty well so far, though I’ve had it running for just a few hours. Only created two mail loops in the process. Not bad, I expected more.
