Sort Evolution Mail Filters With Python
I really like filtering my mail. I tend to only need to act on a very small set of messages coming in, so I filter everything such as Ads, FYIs, Cron Jobs, etc to folders and just leave the important stuff in my inbox.
Unfortunately though, I now have a few hundred rules, as I keep things separated out to let me have multiple conditions for single senders and keep everything fairly organized. I try to keep these alphabetized, but that’s quite the chore.
As an aside, I name my rules in a standard way. Here are some rule names:
Ads / Tech / AWS
FYI / Let's Encrypt
Crons / Backups / Offsite
Rather than continue to organize them by hand, I’ve created a simple little python script to sort the XML file automatically:
import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
from operator import attrgetter
tree = ET.parse('filters.xml')
root = tree.getroot()
def getKey(element):
return element.find('title').text
out = sorted(root[0], key=getKey)
top = ET.Element('ruleset')
for element in out:
top.append(element)
root[0] = top
with open('new.xml', 'wb') as f:
tree.write(f)
To use this, copy out the Evolution filters file (located at
~/.config/evolution/mail/filters.xml) and place it in the same directory as
the script. Run the script, and it will spit out a new sorted list in
new.xml. Inspect that file and copy it back into the ~/.config path to
install it.
This won’t modify the rule’s actions, it just sorts by the title you’ve given
to each rule.