Manage Your Gmail Filters from the Linux Command Line

The gmailctl command-line tool manages email filters with a simple standards-based configuration file.

Server-side mail rules are one of the most efficient ways to pre-sort and filter mail. Sadly, Gmail, the most popular mail service in the world, doesn't use any of the standard protocols to allow users to manage their rules. Adding, editing, or removing a single rule can be a time-consuming task in the web interface, depending on how many rules the user has in place. The options for editing them "out of band" as provided by the company are limited to an XML export and import.

I have 109 mail filters, so I know what a chore it can be to manage them using the provided methods. At least until I discovered gmailctl, the command-line tool for managing Gmail filters with a (relatively) simple standards-based configuration file.