Sieve mail filtering language was inspired by (and hopefully lessons were learned) from the Flames filtering language.
The history of Sieve language is described below:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1994-95 | informal meetings between the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University on IMAP issues touch upon mail filtering architecture. An initial architectural proposal is made for how server-side filtering of mail might work. |
| December 7, 1995 | At IMSP BOF at 34th IETF Meeting at Dallas, Texas, discussion of Sieve-like architecture. |
| January 8, 1996 | MTA Filtering special interest group meeting held at First International IMAP conference, University of Washington, Seattle. Significant discussion is belayed at this time in favor of more pressing internet mail issues. |
| June 24, 1996 | 36th IETF, Montreal, Canada - informal interest polled at the meeting of DRUMS (the working group resposible for revision of the RFC822 message standard and RFC821 SMTP standard). |
| November 7, 1996 | MTA Filtering BOF meeting held at Second International IMAP conference, University of Washington, Seattle. This BOF was attended by over 40 persons from a variety of vendors, and was the first significant public discussion of the architecture by a fairly large number of internet mail server and client vendors. |
| December 12, 1996 | 37th IETF meeting in San Jose - informal BOF on mail filtering and SPAM (raw minutes). This meeting started out as an informal discussion of anti-spamming techniques, and the need for a distinct, standardized language for server-side filtering was discussed. The conclusion was that this should be pursued as a separate activity. Participants of the November IMAP meeting not also at this meeting were notified of this by private mail. |
| January 11, 1997 | mta-filters mailing list established at Internet Mail Consortium; first posting. |
| January 15, 1997 | Strawman taken on mta-filters mailing list to establish continued interest in standardization. |
| March 24, 1997 | First International ACAP Meeting held in Pittsburgh, PA. First draft of Sieve specification reviewed in informal working group. |
| October 24, 1997 | Second version of Sieve specification issued. |
| January 28, 1998 | Third version of Sieve specification issued. |
| January 28, 1998 | First version of Vacation Sieve extension specification issued. |
| Feburary 26, 1998 | Second International ACAP Meeting held in San Diego, CA, hosted by Qualcomm, Inc. Sieve requirements for ACAP storage and transport were discussed. |
| March 31, 1998 | First formal Sieve BOF meeting at 41st IETF, Los Angeles, California. (Official Minutes) The results of this meeting were that there was strong consensus that the general work should proceed as official standards-track work, while there was a mixture of opinion with respect to scope issues. It was decided here that a formal Working Group was probably not necessary, pending implementation of a revised specification. The slides for a presentation on the syntax of Sieve at the time (now obsolete) are available here (in PostScript format). |
| August 7, 1998 | Fourth version of Sieve specification issued. |
| November 17, 1998 | First version of IMAP Flags Sieve extension specification issued. |
| November 18, 1998 | Fifth version of Sieve specification issued. |
| December 7, 1998 | informal design meeting at 43rd IETF, Orlando, Florida. (Informal minutes are here) |
| January 11, 1999 | First open source sample implementation publically issued by Carnegie Mellon University. |
| February 24, 1999 | Draft 007 of the Sieve spec posted to Internet Draft archive. |
| March 16, 1999 | Second official Sieve BOF, 44th IETF, Minneapolis (Official Minutes) |
| June, 1999 | Version 1.1 of CMU Sieve Release |
| July, 1999 | Version 1.2 of CMU Sieve Release |
| July 14, 1999 | Draft 008 of Sieve spec posted |
| September, 1999 | Draft 009 of Sieve spec posted; “release candidate” |
| April, 2000 | Draft 010 of Sieve spec: last call to mailing list |
| January, 2001 | RFC 3028 on “Sieve: A Mail Filtering Language” is published |
| December, 2002 | RFC 3431 on “Sieve Extension: Relational Tests” by W. Segmuller is published |
| around March 2003 | Kjetil T. Homme starts working on Sieve Variables extension |
| September, 2003 | RFC 3598 on “Sieve Email Filtering – Subaddress Extension” by Ken Murchison is published |
| 2000-2004 | Many Sieve bar BOFs at different IETFs |
| February, 2004 | RFC 3685 on “SIEVE Email Filtering: Spamtest and VirusTest Extensions” by Cyrus Daboo is published |
| around July 2004 | People actively implementing Sieve and extensions start talking about forming a Sieve Working Group |
| October, 2004 | RFC 3894 on “Sieve Extension: Copying Without Side Effects” by Jutta Degener is published |
| November, 2004 | The first official Sieve BOF at Washington, DC IETF |
| 18 November 2004 | Sieve WG is approved by IESG |