An alterntive to .forward?

[graemev]

For many years now (at home) I've run a local "server" (dovecot) and allowed my email to be stored for about 15 minutes by my ISP , then used fetchmail(1) to pull it down, then delivered locally using smtp (exim4(8)).

Some of my users (aka family) opted not to read email locally but instead added a .forward to gmail.

So the overall effect was:

1. You mail say, my wife, the mail goes to my ISP ...

2. I pull it down via fetchmail(1) , run it through a set of maildrop(1) rules ...
   mail addressed to name.bae@mydomain is always junk/spam
   mail to kindle@mydomain is of interest to everybody
   mail with no to: header but from xxx@yyyy is really meant for user@mydomain

3. run spamassaasin and based on the score, route to spam
   ...many more such

4. Then if the email ends up in my wife's account, her .forward passes onto gmail

Now I was forced to change my ISP (they applied RPI to bills) and bought an external email provider (forwardemail.net) now they do a number of clever things but one thing they won't (trivially) do , so if I get mail from acme.com and my wife's .forward tries to send it onto gmail they will block it because (505)I'm not the sender! ... seems harsh as my wife if simply sending to her own account. Of course there is no way one account is linked to the other ...so she "could" be spamming :-)

Last night about 4AM I woke up with an epiphany .... "what my wife really wants to do is simply move messages from one mailbox (at home) to another (at gmail)" and I started to mentally spec out a tool I planned to write , it would use imap protocol and be configured using LUA .....I started to look for some code to steal to get me started, so imagine my surprise upon discovering imapfilter!

Having read a small amount, it occurred to me:

1. Actually there is no need to move mail from forwardemail.net -> home -> gmail ... I can just go direct
2. There's lots more clever stuff I can do, age out mail on both server for example
3. The spamassassin step would be problimatic

This tool seems the be the answer to all my problems . Am I getting ahead of myself.