SIEVE is a mail filtering language, intended for server-side filtering of emails. See RFC 3028 and Cyrusoft's page about SIEVE for more details.
In a nutshell, with SIEVE, all email gets filtered even before the mail hits your inbox. This has numerous implications, both good and bad. The language was designed to have no variables and no methods for iterating, thus making the language very secure.
MANAGESIEVE is a protocol for managing (uploading, downloading, activating) SIEVE scripts on a remote mail server. Cyrus IMAP project's timsieved is the most popular impelementation of SIEVE and MANAGESIEVE in the open source world.
sieve-php is a class written in PHP that supports the MANAGESIEVE protocol, in order to allow users of web interfaces written in PHP to interact with such servers without knowing any of the backend details.
Currently sieve-php is just a library, not an application. Although it does include some sample scripts to show off its capabilities, which actually work(!), you should not expect to download a complete application. Remember, this is a library!
18-Dec-2003: Sieve-php.lib Version 0.1.0 has been released.
The documentation is available online. It is also included in the distribution file.
To see a sieve-php demo in action, try one of these:
Please join sieve-php-devel mailing list.
The original author is Dan Ellis.
Dan has kindly passed on maintainership to Alexandros Vellis, in order to apply some patches and fix just one or two bugs that are lying around.
These related projects might be of interest: