Deflexion.com

Thanks to IMAP, it's easy to use the same mailboxes with multiple email clients. Unfortunately, it's currently not easy to use the same address book with multiple email clients. There are lots of possible ways to do this, including using ACAP, IMAP, IMSP, LDAP, SyncML, WebDAV, a web service protocol, or maybe a feed protocol such as Atom, but none of these possibilities is widely supported by IMAP clients and IMAP service providers. LDAP is the most widely supported and is what I've been using ever since Tuffmail started supporting it on May 6 [1].

The shared-greenlist problem is similar [2] to the shared-address-book problem because both greenlists & address books (ideally) should be:

• readable from any email client
• editable from any email client
• not public

In addition to these three requirements, greenlists also need to be accessible by the system on which the incoming email is filtered. Since my IMAP provider's system does not support greenlists & address books that are editable by my desktop email clients, I need to use their web-based email client to update my greenlist & address book. Since I rarely use web-based email clients, this is a pain, but I need to do it at most once a day. Here is the system I'm currently using to keep track of what addresses need to be added to my greenlist & address book.

1. Use any of my email clients to manage my MaybeSpam mailbox, i.e. to . . .:
   1. delete & expunge spam; and
      
   2. set the IMAP \Flagged flag on non-spam messages (false positives).
2. Set up my web-based email client so that when it starts, it automatically displays the MaybeSpam mailbox.
3. In the web-based email client, add the appropriate addresses from each flagged messages in my MaybeSpam mailbox to my greenlist & address book. In Tuffmail's installation of Horde/IMP, this involves opening each "Important" () message and clicking both the "Whitelist" button [3] and the address book icon ().
   

Of course, if you use the web-based client for Step 1, you can immediately add the relevant addresses to your greenlist & address book, and you do not need to flag the false positives (i.e., you can skip Step 1B).

Please post if you have any thoughts about managing server-side greenlists & server-side address books. I'm especially interested in figuring out standard ways to do this and getting all email clients and all email service providers to use these standards!

[1] In addition to Tuffmail, IMAP Partners and LuxSci also offer LDAP-accessible address books. (Please tell me about other providers that offer this.)

[2] On many systems, the list of addresses in a user's address book is that user's greenlist. For example, this is how FastMail.FM does their greenlisting and this is how I've been maintaining my greenlist for more than eight years.

[3] In some Horde/IMP installations the "Whitelist" button is named something else (my preference is "Greenlist" :-)).
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