ManageSieve - A Protocol for Remotely Managing Sieve Scripts

The Sieve specifications normally describe Sieve as a mail filtering language, that is, focus on its syntax, capabilities and usage. However, there is a need for users to upload in some way their Sieve scripts to their respective mail servers, when server-side filtering is desired. Thus the ManageSieve protocol was born.

ManageSieve is described in IETF draft martin-managesieve.

From its abstract:

  Sieve scripts allow users to filter incoming email. Message stores
  are commonly sealed servers so users cannot log into them, yet users
  must be able to update their scripts on them.  This document
  describes a protocol "sieve" for securely managing Sieve scripts on
  a remote server.  This protocol allows a user to have multiple
  scripts, and also alerts a user to syntactically flawed scripts.

The most famous implementation of ManageSieve is that of Cyrus Imapd project. ManageSieve is handled there by the 'timsieved' daemon.

Other server software, such as Exim, do not provide such an interface and expect that the users upload in some other way their scripts.