[ingo] sieve filters on addresses doesn't follow expected behavior: reasoning?

[Steve Block]

Hi.

I recently installed horde, imp, ingo, and turba from CVS and got 
everything up and running. Setup was fairly easy and the system seems to 
work quite well. My mail server is running Cyrus 2.1.18, and I use sieve 
for server-side mail filtering.

I was having trouble with a few of the sieve filters I created in ingo, 
however. In particular, the filter I created to sort email from the 
server's cron daemon into its own folder did not appear to be working.

I looked at the ingo-generated sieve script more closely and realized 
that it was only checking against the From _address_, and not the whole 
header. I had created the rule to file the email where From contained 
"Cron Daemon", since the 'root' email address sometimes sends other mail
that should be filed elsewhere. Since the generated script only checked 
against the address, the match would always fail and the message would 
always end up in my inbox.

I checked into the sieve.php file for ingo and found where the checking 
for To, From, Cc, or Bcc occurs, and where it switches into matching by 
address rather than header. I then disabled that check, told it to match 
by header, and things seem to be working the way I expect.

So far all this makes sense, except the reason why this extra check was 
implemented in the first place. The comment above that check says:

/* Do 'smarter' searching for fields where we know we have                      
 * * e-mail addresses. */

but I find this behavior to be anything but smart. I don't believe that 
one can assume that a user going to the Filters page to create a filter 
on the "From" field knows that he should be using an email address as 
the criteria. Most mail clients, IMP included, show the person's name in 
the From field on every email, and this behavior would lead the user, 
like it did me, into thinking he could filter on anything in From.

Not only that, but in this day and age of free email addresses, some 
people, including some of my friends, seem to send mail from a host of 
random accounts they have opened. One day I may get an email from 
'Your Friend <somebody at gmail.com>', and the next day it might be
'Your Friend <somebody1235 at yahoo.com>'. I should be able to create a 
filter based on matching Your Friend if I want to.

Thus, this clever programming breaks what I believe to be the
standard user-expected behavior for filtering by who sent the email.
It eliminates any flexibility in matching on those headers as well.

I checked CVS for when this was implemented, and the changelog for
sieve.php when this behavior was introduced has the following comment: 

"When the From/To/Cc/Bcc fields are selected in the condition, it
generates the same type of test as for the rest of the header tests.
This isn't ideal because it includes the text outside of the <>'s.
Instead, use Sieve_Test_Address instead of Sieve_Test_Header if one of 
those fields is selected."

I fail to see how this wasn't ideal. What's more, I fail to see how the 
change is ideal, even if the original implementation wasn't either.

I do see that this change was made over 2 and a half years ago, so maybe
I'm the only one who finds this frustrating. Obviously I have dealt with
the problem for myself, but I wonder if the reasoning behind the 
original change should be revisited, and better filter generating 
behavior introduced.

I know this message was long, so thanks to those who made it all the way 
through. I hope I was coherent enough to get my point across without
sounding like too much of an asshole.

Regards,

-- 
Steve Block
http://ev-15.com/
http://steveblock.com/
scblock at ev-15.com