Efficiently Setting Up Filters for Bulk Email Forwarding?

dsn

Hey Community 🙂,

I have a large volume of emails (about 5,000) that need to be forwarded to a group of 20 different people. I’m trying to set up filters to automate this process, but I don’t want to create a separate filter for each individual email.

Filtering by sender isn’t viable because all the emails come from the same address. Does anyone have ideas on how to streamline this process? I’d appreciate any insights on using filters effectively or alternative solutions to avoid manual forwarding.

Thanks in advance!

esackbauer

Share the folder where the mails are in via SOGOs “Share” function.

dsn

esackbauer Unfortunately that’s not possible because that’s a security breach, they will see each others e-mails. But it’s a good approach. Thanks for that 🙂

esackbauer

dsn Sure is that possible. Put the 5000 mails in a separate subfolder and share only that.
Welcome to Groupware functions 😉

Or do you mean out of that 5000, not all are intended for the same recipients? Then create subfolders for each of them and share that only with the respectivbe ppl.

dsn

esackbauer It’s many e-mails and I want to build a longterm automated flow that e-mails are being forwarded to the right people. And this includes a total of 5.000 e-mail aliases.

esackbauer

Forwarding those mails will let the total number of mails explode.
Filing it in the proper folders is easier. That can be automatically moved by filters in SOGo or more advanced with Sieve scripts.

dsn 5.000 e-mail aliases.

What? Now are you talking about 5000 aliases? Before you were talking about mails.

dsn

esackbauer When I said mails, I mean e-mails as in e-mail accounts that are sending mails to my mailserver.

However, we need a real-time solution of forwarding e-mails.

Do you think mailcow can handle it, if we create 5.000 forwarding rules to different e-mails and just do the manual work?
If yes, is there an approach where managing/deleting/creating rules can be automated?

esackbauer

As I mentioned before, forwarding is the wrong approach. Forwarding is 1990s, today we have Groupware.
You should file it into folders of one or more mailboxes and share that with users. Set the filters to move incoming mails to respective folders. That is done in realtime.

Maybe I do not fully understand your use case. Please bring some examples. And try to be concise. you do not have -email accounts sending to your server, it is email-addresses (as sender-from)

dsn

esackbauer Thanks for explaining. Moving into folders and sharing the folder makes totally sense.

Here is my example:
One user should receive (or get access to a folder) e-mails from a list of 2.000 different e-mail addresses. How would you solve that?

My approach: Creating the following filter:

Can I just add for example 2.000 conditions without mailcow and the server facing problems? Or is there a more efficient way?

I can’t set different conditions, as the mails are almost identical. I still need to separate them. The only way to separate them is by “To or CC” - I was thinking if it’s maybe possible to set the value to “email2 AND email3” etc… but doesn’t work as well.

esackbauer

dsn receive (or get access to a folder) e-mails from a list of 2.000 different e-mail addresses

I still don’t get it. Is test.de your mailcow mail domain?
What is then the “from a list of 2.000 different e-mail addresses”? that would mean sender mail address. Your filter shows then receiving mail addres…

What you are explaining sounds like aliasses. Would be aliasses a solution? A user has his main email address associated with his account. And then you can have multiple aliases that he will be also receiving mails for.

dsn

esackbauer

esackbauertest@test.de and esackbauertest2@test.de are two of the 2.000 e-mail addresses we’re receiving e-mails.
That was maybe a bad example, because the e-mails would usually look like that, because it’s real e-mails from for example web.de. So let’s say it’s esackbauertest@web.de and esackbauertest2@web.de and we have 5.000 of them that should be accessible by different people.

esackbauertest@web.de and esackbauertest2@web.de forwards to our mailserver then. This is the all in one inbox.
The 2.000 e-mail addresses are receiving newsletter e-mails from e.g. adidas and apple.com.

Aliases is not a solution, because it’s web.de and gmx. They don’t support that.

esackbauer

Ok now I understand it. Its 2000 “from” addresses. However I do not understand what you are doing with all those newsletters 😉
I would still propose to use a shared folder for this “one inbox” and make this accessible (“freigeben” as I think you are german) to your internal users.
This way you have only one ruleset in place. Your ruleset above seems wrong, as it is selecting on “to” instead of “from”.

You can also have a look at “+” addressing, it would automatically create subfolders depending on your alias.
E.g. you have you have “domain.de” as your mailcow domain. You have a user with “honeypot@domain.de” as “the all in one” mailbox.
So you can use “honeypot+adidas@domain.de” without any additional effort, and mailcow will automatically create a folder “adidas” and file received mails into that folder. This can then be shared with agent1..n@domain.de.
https://docs.mailcow.email/manual-guides/mailcow-UI/u_e-mailcow_ui-sub_addressing/

dsn

esackbauer Thanks for the answer.

I’m indeed for germany hahah, good job 🙂

That’s an incoming mail example and it’s “to:” :

However, how would you set the rule filter as efficient as possible? Can I just do it like that?

esackbauer

Sorry, now I am confused again. This is a mail from Costco to a gmail account. What has this to do with mailcow?
are you assuming mailcow is “gmail.com”?

dsn

esackbauer Of course not.

That’s the current setup: nahidhassen992@gmail.com forwards to: mailservicebrand@gmail.com.
mailservicebrand@gmail.com forwards to my mailcow catch-all address.

That’s why it’s under: “to:”

Now I want to know on how I can set the filter rules as efficient as possible.

esackbauer

Ok, I still do not understand what you want to achieve here. Maybe you can put your use case together so we can better understand why you forward and then forward again. When forwarding is actually bad/old practice.

dsn

esackbauer

Forget the forwarding please. That’s mandatory for us, we can’t change.

I’m just asking on how I can apply the filters the best way possible. can I do the Syntax: “mail1” AND “mail2” for example? Or is there any other syntax for this?

Or can I somehow manage the filters differently? For example in a code or with an api?

Do you have a suggestion for this

Thanks already soo much for the help.

SimplyCorbett

Hi.

Are these emails going to a single email account and then you want it forwarded to various people?

Yes -> Using the GUI method above in SOGo will work but will be time consuming. You can instead edit the email addresses sieve filters directly through text and manipulate them that way. However, it’s not possible to do this via mailcows GUI. You will need to find an app that can do this. KMail on KDE has this ability.

You -can- use mailcows GUI to create a pre-filter for emails and do this the same way, though.

If the emails are NOT going to a single email address then you will need to make a global pre-filter to do this.

dsn

SimplyCorbett Dear Simply Corbett,

Thanks for your help!

What do you mean by: global pre-filter exactly?

Also do you know an alternative to Kmail on KDE for windows where we can efficiently manage rule filters?

SimplyCorbett

dsn There is an option in the mailcow admin UI called “global pre-filter” which is a text field you can edit.

As mentioned, you can also modify the users server-side sieve filters directly with a mail client such as KMail.

dsn

I have seen something like directly modifying the .sieve files inside the mailserver itself.

Is there a good way on how to do it? And does this even make sense?

Like with an external e-mail client or something.