Removing marketing links in e-mails with Sieve

May 22, 2017

E-mail marketing companies track the link opened in the e-mails to offer a better vision of what worked and what did not to the client. The tracking method consist to rewrite every links in the e-mail with links to a server of the marketing company which then redirects the customer to the right page.

This leads to having some weird and unintellegible links in the e-mails we receive every day, like so :

http://xxxx.srvn.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=yyyyyyyy&id=zzzzzzzz&e=ppppppppp

This bothers me as I do not know where I will be redirected. So I used Sieve and python to rewrite the links back.

Sieve is a language to filter e-mail messages. It can take several actions as classifying e-mails or sending them to third party programs. In this case it will allow us to filter the e-mails and depending on the sending address, rewrite the links or not.

My global sieve config file contains :

plugin {
    ...
    sieve_plugins = sieve_extprograms
    sieve_filter_bin_dir = /folder/to/sieve/scripts
    sieve_extensions = +vnd.dovecot.filter
    sieve_filter_exec_timeout = 60s
    ...
}

My local sieve config file looks like this :

require ["copy","fileinto","imap4flags", "vnd.dovecot.filter"];
# rule:[Marketing URL]
if header :contains "from" "marketing@campain.thx"
{
    filter "filter.py";
}

Then we need to create the python script at : /folder/to/sieve/scripts/filter.py. It reads the e-mail in MIME format from stdin, then parses for URLs. I chose the regex to catch links to other sites, link to the 1px image that indicates that I read the e-mail and link to unsuscribe (as I do not want my script to unsuscribe by mistake).

For each link to another website, it does a request and retrieves the Location header and replaces the link with this new URL. For the other links, it replaces them with a link to Google.

The last thing to note is that the e-mail should be sent back to stdout in MIME format.

Enjoy your e-mails with comprehensible links :)