Snooze (Roundcube)

Adds the ability to "snooze" email messages to Roundcube.

Installation

Prerequistites:

• RoundCube 1.5.2 with Elastic skin
• DoveCot 2.2.33.2
• Python 3.6.9

Please note:

• Other versions of the above may work, but this is the configuration I tested with.
• Only DoveCot IMAP back ends are supported although others might work if you're able to create an appropriate wake-up script. (see snooze.py to see how the dovecot version works).
• Anything other than the above and you're on your own.

IMPORTANT This plugin re-writes email messages and can change DoveCot's internally stored date (ie: the arrival time) of the message. If your company/organisation has strict regulatory or compliance rules then it's up to you to check if this is allowed.

IMPORTANT This plugin hasn't yet been heavily tested and should be considered very experimental.

Installation:

1. In your RoundCube plugin directory. eg:

   cd /usr/local/lib/roundcubemail/plugins/
   

2. Clone the git repository into a subdirectory named "snooze":

   git clone https://github.com/toptensoftware/roundcube-snooze.git snooze
   

3. Edit Roundcube's main configuration file eg:

   vi /usr/local/lib/roundcubemail/config/config.inc.php
   

   and add the plugin's name to the active plugins array. eg:

   $config['plugins'] = array('plugin1', 'plugin2', /* other plugins */, 'snooze');

   Tip: place the 'snooze' plugin just after the 'archive' plugin to have the button appear to the right of the Archive button.

4. Configure a cron job to run the server-side wake up script:

   crontab -e
   

   with something like this (for accurate wake times):

   * * * * * python3 /usr/local/lib/roundcubemail/plugins/snooze/snooze.py
   

   or, perhaps every five minutes will suffice (who snoozes emails to 13 past the hour anyway?)

   */5 * * * * python3 /usr/local/lib/roundcubemail/plugins/snooze/snooze.py
   

5. Optionally, configure dovecot so that each user has a mailbox named Snoozed. (without this, each user must manually create the mailbox)

Usage

Snoozing an email:

1. If you don't already have it, create a root level mailbox named Snoozed.

2. Select the email(s) to snooze.

3. From the toolbar, click the "Snooze" button and choose what time the message should be woken.

4. When the snooze time arrives, the email will be automatically moved back to its original mailbox (or the inbox if that mailbox no longer exists).

Notes:

• When an email is snoozed, it will appear in the Snoozed mailbox and a note will be added to the header when viewing the message showing when the message is due to be woken.

  

• When an email is woken, it will be moved back to its original mailbox and a note shown in the message header saying when it was originally snoozed.

  

• You can manually unsnooze a snoozed message via the unsnooze command (either from the message header, or the toolbar drop down).

• You can also unsnooze a message by simply moving it out of the Snoozed mailbox.

• When an email is woken, it's arrival date will be changed to the time it was woken and it will be marked as unread.

Configuration

See config.in.php in the plugin directory for configuration options.

Run python3 snooze.py --help for options controlling the wake up script.

How it Works

The plugin stores all snooze information in a custom e-mail header named X-Snoozed with the following format:

X-Snoozed: at Fri, 13 May 2022 10:16:56 +1000;
    until Fri, 13 May 2022 10:17:00 +1000;
    from INBOX;
    woken

Where:

• at = the time the message was snoozed
• until = the time the message is scheduled to be woken
• from = the mailbox the message was in before being snoozed
• woken = only present if the message tripped its scheduled time and was woken by the crontab script.

Since IMAP emails are immutable any changes to this header requires "re-writing" the email. ie: fetching the email, creating a new email with the same content and deleting the original email.

Snoozing an email uses IMAP to:

1. Fetch the entire original email
2. Remove any old X-Snoozed header
3. Add a new X-Snoozed header
4. Save the modified message back to the original mailbox
5. Delete the original message
6. Move the message to the Snoozed mailbox

Snoozing an already snoozed email is similar to the above except the "from" mailbox attribute is copied from the existing snooze header.

Manually unsnoozing a snoozed email is basically the opposite, again done via IMAP:

1. Fetch the entire original email
2. Remove any old X-Snoozed header
3. Save the modified message
4. Move the message out of the Snoozed mailbox back to its original location.

The wake script needs to work without knowing the user's login details and uses the doveadm tool to:

1. Enmuerate the Snoozed mailboxes for all users (doveadm mailbox)
2. Enumerate all messages in the Snoozed mailbox that have the X-Snoozed header. (doveadm fetch)
3. Check the header's until attribute and compare to the current date/time

For emails that are due to be woken:

1. Fetch the email (doveadm fetch)
2. Modify the X-Snoozed header adding the woken tag.
3. Save the message back to its original mailbox (doveadm save)
4. Deleting the original message (doveadm expunge)

Known Issues and Limitations

• Requires Elastic skin, but will accept a pull requests for other skins.
• Currently only available in English, but will accept a pull requests for translations.
• If a message without a Message-ID header is slept, upon waking it will have lost all its IMAP flags. This is because doveadm doesn't provide a mechanism to learn the UID of the newly saved message. To restore the flags, the wake script uses the message id instead - and if the message doesn't have a message-id it can't easily restore those flags.
• After snoozing messages, the mail list view is refreshed (rather than dynamically updated). I might fix this at some point depending how annoying I find it.

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.