— Action: stop

The stop action ends all processing. If no actions have been executed, then the keep action is taken.

— Action: keep

The effect of this action is to preserve the current message in the mailbox. This action is executed if no other action has been executed.

— Action: discard

Discard silently throws away the current message. No notification is returned to the sender, the message is deleted from the mailbox.

Example:

          if header :contains ["from"] ["idiot@example.edu"]
            {
              discard;
            }
     

— Action: fileinto folder

Required arguments:

folder

A string representing the folder name

The fileinto action delivers the message into the specified folder.

— Action: reject reason

The optional reject action refuses delivery of a message by sending back a message delivery notification to the sender. It resends the message to the sender, wrapping it in a “reject” form, noting that it was rejected by the recipient. The required argument reason is a string specifying the reason for rejecting the message.

Example:

If the message contained

          Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:06:31 -0800 (PST)
          From: coyote@desert.example.org
          To: roadrunner@acme.example.com
          Subject: I have a present for you
          
          I've got some great birdseed over here at my place.
          Want to buy it?
     

and the user's script contained:

          if header :contains "from" "coyote@desert.example.org"
            {
              reject "I am not taking mail from you, and I don't want
                      your birdseed, either!";
            }
     

then the original sender <coyote@desert.example.org> would receive the following notification:

          To: <coyote@desert.example.org>
          X-Authentication-Warning: roadrunner set sender using -f flag
          Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
          MIME-Version: 1.0
          ----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
          The original message was received at
          Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:07:15 -0800 from
          coyote@desert.example.org.
          Message was refused by recipient's mail filtering program.
          Reason given was as follows:
          
          I am not taking mail from you, and I don't want your birdseed, either!
          
          ----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
          Content-Type: message/delivery-status
          
          Reporting-UA: sieve; GNU Mailutils 0.1.3
          Arrival-Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:07:15 -0800
          Final-Recipient: RFC822; roadrunner@acme.example.com
          Action: deleted
          Disposition: automatic-action/MDN-sent-automatically;deleted
          Last-Attempt-Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:07:15 -0800
          
          ----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
          Content-Type: message/rfc822
          
          From: coyote@desert.example.org
          To: roadrunner@acme.example.com
          Subject: I have a present for you
          
          I've got some great birdseed over here at my place.
          Want to buy it?
          ----- =_aaaaaaaaaa0
     

If the reason argument is rather long, the common approach is to use the combination of the text: and #include keywords, e.g.:

          if header :mime :matches "Content-Type"
                    [ "*application/msword;*", "*audio/x-midi*" ]
            {
              reject text:
          #include "nomsword.txt"
              .
              ;
            }
     

— Action: redirect address

The redirect action is used to send the message to another user at a supplied address, as a mail forwarding feature does. This action makes no changes to the message body or existing headers, but it may add new headers. It also modifies the envelope recipient.

The redirect command performs an MTA-style “forward” — that is, what you get from a .forward file using sendmail under unix. The address on the SMTP envelope is replaced with the one on the redirect command and the message is sent back out. Notice, that it differs from the MUA-style forward, which creates a new message with a different sender and message ID, wrapping the old message in a new one.