I find evolution to be pretty slow to filter my mail; if I come back
after a weekend without evo running, then it can take a good 20
minutes or so filtering mail before it’s ready again. I use a pretty
roundabout way of getting mail: fetchmail fetches it from the main
mailserver and delivers it using procmail to my maildir inbox on NFS,
which is then served by IMAP from the fileserver back to evo on my
workstation. I like IMAP, and ideally the mail would just get
delivered to the fileserver, but I don’t have that luxury yet :)
But I’m using procmail, which means that all the mail can potentially
be filtered as it’s delivered, which would save plenty of perceived
time. I wondered if there was such a beast that could convert
evolution filters to procmailrc format. Turns out there isn’t.
But it also turns out that the filters are stored in an overengineered
bit of XML in your .evolution directory, and after perusing it I
realised I could probably write an XSLT to convert it.
So, here’s the first draft of
evo2procmail.xsl
which isn’t terribly crash hot, but can give you a .procmailrc fragment
that’s pretty close to what you want. It will definitely need some
editing afterwards, as I haven’t bothered translating evo filter names
into their actual headers, nor do the targets look anything like what
you want to send them to.
Run it like this:
xsltproc evo2procmail.xsl ~/.evolution/mail/filters.xml
Enjoy! (Experienced XSLT hackers are encouraged to improve this :)