Server-side email filtering/sorting?

I have contacted HG support about this and they said it can't be done, so I'm asking other HG users.

I am currently using IMAP software (SquirrelMail) to access my email. I have the default catch-all address going to my email account, where I then have filters to "sort" and "file" the email into IMAP folders based on the "To" address. For instance, when I sign up on a website that requires an email address, i.e. somedomain.com, I give them www-somedomain.com@mydomain.com. When I see the "www-" part, I know instantly that it's one I gave out to a website. The rest tells me who. I have an IMAP folder for somedomain.com's email, and a SquirrelMail filter to move the email to that folder. I have used this configuration for almost 9 years on many many webhosts and it's always worked great.

At this point in the game, I receive DAILY spam messages in the thousands because of these different websites selling or giving my addresses away (the biggest single offender being GameSpy with about 200-800 per day sometimes :\ ). You would not believe how many "privacy" policies I've seen violated, and I know exactly who's doing it because every address I give out is unique. It's simply not efficient to have SquirrelMail do the sorting and I'm used to other webhosts having measures in place to have the server sort the mail as it comes in instead of the client doing it. It takes upwards of 15 minutes to get logged in sometimes, depending on how much mail has found its way past SpamAssassin.

Now my question is this... I've always had hosts that provided a GUI way to set up this kind of filtering, so I've never done it myself on a non-Exchange server. Does anyone know of a way to have HG do the sorting? I don't see anything in CPanel or WHM, except for the "hint" of using a script as the default address. I've asked HG support about this and they say it can't be done, but I'm betting it can with the proper knowledge and application.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer.

Ryan

Sorry, this should be in a support forum, but it's not "pre-sales" at this point and I've already asked the HG folks.

Does HG support Sieve? It has Horde, which says it supports Sieve filter rules. Does anyone know anything about HG's Sieve implementation? It would be nice to have a CPanel applet for Sieve.

Well, I *finally* figured it out! And here it is for those who are curious. (*wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* HG tech support!)

1. Look in the Cpanel file manager and get the full path to where you want the email to go. This should look something like "/home/yourdomain/mail/parkeddomainname/user/...folders (if any).../mailbox"

2. Go into the Mail icon on Cpanel, click E-mail Filtering, Add Filter, create the condition (i.e. From contains maillistdomain.com), and for the Destination, simply use the path from step 1.

3. If the mailbox doesn't exist when the first email comes in, it will be created. You must now "subscribe" to the new mailbox in your client. For SquirrelMail, click Folders on the top menu, then you'll see the new mailbox in right side of the Subscribe/Unsubscribe list.

4. Optionally create a script that adds the mailbox to the ".mailbox" file automatically if it's not already in there so the user doesn't have to manually subscribe.

Thought this might help somebody. Happy webbing!

Me

FYI...

By the way, mailboxes are just plain-text files inside normal file folders in the /home/yourprimaryloginordomain/mail/domainname/user/... directory.