New rule builder tool

[FredOnline]

@Fastmail on Twitter:

Changes are coming to rules that will allow you to preview rules you create, quickly organize messages that are already in your mailbox, and more!

You can try our new rule builder tool here: beta.fastmail.com/settings/rules

In Fastmail Beta:

Upgrade rules

Fastmail is building improvements to our email rules and filters, and we want your feedback!
What’s new?

Block Sender feature
Apply rules to messages you’ve already received
Preview new rules to make sure you’ll catch the right messages
Rules can now take more than one action
Discard rules now move unwanted messages to Trash, instead of permanently deleting them, so you can always restore from backup if something goes wrong.

What happens next

Clicking "Activate New Rules" will update your account immediately. This includes our production website, in addition to beta.fastmail.com.

If you have Discard rules that only match a single email address or domain, these will be converted to Blocked Senders. Other rules that discarded messages now delete the messages to the Trash.

If something unexpected happens, you can turn off new rules and filters at any time! Your account will return to the state it was in when you first upgraded. Please contact our support team with the details of what went wrong so they can look into it.

[xyzzy]

I sent in my initial batch of comments on this but only on it's impact on how it changes the sieve code and how those changes impact my code additions. Still need to look more closely on their filter changes.

Note, Spam Protection settings have now been moved to the Filters & Rules page.

[FredOnline]

This question was asked a few times on Twitter:

Will you still support custom sieve rules?

And @Fastmail answered:

Yes, we will still be offering custom sieve rules!

Our new filters and rules will not be replacing sieve; we just hope that the strengthened filters and rules updates can limit the instances in which sieve is needed.

Does that mean they would prefer that sieve wasn't used?

[xyzzy]

Originally Posted by FredOnline

Does that mean they would prefer that sieve wasn't used?

I think they always have preferred that, at least since I started using FM. But it's there and I use it for a bunch of stuff that cannot be done with the UI.

I played around with a dummy rule to see how it now maps into the sieve code and the bunch of switches they used to effect the options. Not sure I like this but I guess it works. It just doesn't "feel" right, especially the part where it makes a copy of every filtered message only to discard the original later. I certainly don't like the sieve code formatting nor the fact they spread out their generated stuff (larger font, double line spacing).

I already ran into an incompatibility that could break any additions you may have added to the end of the script, i.e., after the sequence of rules elsif blocks. I thought I should mention it in case anyone else runs into this.

The "old" code sections 7 (Sieve generated for organize rules) and 8 (Sieve generated for fetch mail filing) are a sequence of elsif blocks. If you added your own code in the last edit block that follows you might be tempted to continue with additional elsif blocks. I did.

The new sieve code is different starting with new section 4d (Do rule actions). You cannot continue your own code below starting with an elsif. You need to change it to an if assuming that's sufficient. That's ok for the most part if you know about it up front (hence my warning here). But I didn't. And if you don't update your script you will never know it's a syntax error and I assume the script will not run for incoming email. Not sure what happens under those conditions. Does everything go into the inbox?

I only found this because I was also playing around with the backscatter setting. When I attempted to change it in the spam protection UI then it reported a sieve script error. But as I said, if I hadn't played around with that I would not know why my sieve script would fail had I actually tested it. For the moment I am just looking, not actually running the new stuff (well, unless something got received while I was doing the looking).

As I said in my post 2 I reported all this stuff in a ticket. As a little bonus I've since updated that ticket because I noticed a section 4c (Rule says message is spam) which for the life of me I cannot figure out how that's ever used, since it's testing a switch (variable) that is ever set by any UI that I can think of. Probably left over from something during their development or for something not yet released.