wassimk/email-junk-catcher

A Ruby shell script to manage my e-mail junk folder

email-junk-catcher script

The best spam tool I've ever used allow-listed a set of domains.

So, I execute this simple shell script via a cron job every few minutes to move messages I care about from my SPAM folder back into the Inbox based on the e-mailed from domain name.

Installation

Clone the repo and cd into the folder:

gh repo clone wassimk/email-junk-catcher
cd email-junk-catcher

Next, provide a way to get the email account connection details and login credentials. This ./server.sh script should output a JSON hash of this shape.

{
  "host": "secure.myemailserver.com",
  "username": "me@email.com",
  "password": "password",
  "port": 993,
  "ssl": true
}

Next, make sure the scripts are only executable by your user account:

chmod 500 run.rb server.sh

Now, create the valid domains file with each line containing a domain that starts with an @, e.g., @yahoo.com.

touch valid-domains.conf

Next, open your user's cron table to schedule the job.

crontab -e

And here is the cron job.

*/2 * * * * /usr/bin/env ruby /Users/you/email-junk-catcher/email-junk-catcher.rb  >> /Users/you/email-junk-catcher/run.log 2>&1

Usage

Anytime you need an e-mail that goes to spam that you care about, add the domain to valid-domains.conf.

Log Rotation

One option for rotating the log files is logrotate. Once installed, it's managed by creating a configuration file per set of logs needing rotation.

For example, install it via brew install logrotate and add an email-junk-catcher file to /opt/homebrew/etc/logrotate.d/ with the following contents:

/Users/you/email-junk-catcher/logs/*.log
{
   daily
   rotate 30
   missingok
}