Web UI for imapfilter

Motivation

I really like imapfilter and wanted to run it on my Raspberry Pi, but there were two things holding me back:

1. Having to put the mail account passwords into the plaintext configuration files or having to log in via SSH to enter them.
2. Having to log in via SSH to tweak the configuration and add new rules.

So I've created a simple web UI as frontend for imapfilter. It prompts you for the mail account passwords in the browser, allowing you to use your password manager. And it lets you modify the configuration.

Installation

Requirements:

• imapfilter
• Ruby >= 2.5 (other versions probably work as well, but that's what I used)

sudo apt-get install imapfilter
sudo apt-get install ruby-dev     # in case you don't have it yet
git clone https://github.com/sebastianludwig/imapfilter-web-ui
cd imapfilter-web-ui
[sudo] bundle install
./imapfilter_web_ui.rb

Run as a Service

Modify imapfilter-web-ui.service.template, copy it into /etc/systemd/system and enable the service

sudo cp imapfilter-web-ui.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl start imapfilter-web-ui.service
sudo systemctl status imapfilter-web-ui.service         # check that it started correctly
sudo systemctl enable imapfilter-web-ui.service         # enable the service so it's started automatically

Configuration

Web UI

You can place a config.yaml file into the project folder to adjust the behaviour:

imapfilter:
  # Path to the imapfilter LUA configuration file. 
  # Can either be relative to this file or absolute. 
  # Default is `imapfilter-config.lua`.
  # Requires a restart of imapfilter.
  config: imapfilter-config.lua
  # Enables printing of some brief details of the communication with the server. 
  # Default is `false`.
  # Requires a restart of imapfilter.
  verbose: true
  # Restarts imapfilter in case the process terminates, for example due to a dropped connection.
  # To enable this the login credentials need to be cached in process memory.
  # This cache is reset when manually stopping imapfilter or when updating the configuration.
  # Default is `false`.
  # Requires a restart of the web UI.
  auto-restart: true
web-ui:
  # The interface to bind to. 
  # `0.0.0.0` binds to all available interfaces.
  # Default is `0.0.0.0` for `APP_ENV=production` and `localhost` for `APP_ENV=development`.
  # Requires a restart of the web UI.
  interface: "0.0.0.0"
  # Port to access the UI on. 
  # Default is `4567`.
  # Requires a restart of the web UI.
  port: 4567
  # Enable HTTP Basic Authentication.
  # Default is off.
  # Requires a web server restart.
  basic-auth:
    username:
    password:
  # Path to a log file.
  # If a value is set all log entries will also be written to that file.
  # New log entries are always appended. One the one hand this helps debugging
  # issues which span multiple sessions on the other hand the file will grow
  # indefinitely.
  # Default is undefined.
  # Requires a restart of the web UI.
  log: imapfilter.log
config-repo:
  # Git repository URL to push the configuration to.
  # Should be a private repository.
  url: git@github.com:<user>/<repo>.git
  # Branch to push to.
  # Default is `main`.
  branch: main

imapfilter

imapfilter should be configured to use enter_idle() to keep the process running. You can use imapfilter-config.lua.example as a starting point.

Configuration Repository

The imapfilter configuration can be pushed to a git repository after every update in the web UI. Simply add the config-repo section to your config.yaml file. Consider setting up a deploy key to limit access to the config repo.

The config is only ever pushed to that repo, never pulled.