I've been wondering about ways to handle all the various different Sent/Sent
Messages/Sent Items/etc mailboxes that different clients create and if there
could be a way to make them work at least somewhat better. I'm mainly thinking
about ISP-like installations where users are using tons of different clients
and there's no way to get everyone configured properly. Of course the eventual
solution is hopefully that all the clients will support SPECIAL-USE extension,
but while waiting for that maybe mailbox aliases could help some.
So one possibility would be to force autocreation of wanted specific mailbox
names, and create aliases for the other commonly used mailboxes. The main
difference here for the current behavior is that all of the mailboxes would
contain the same mails, instead of different mails going to different mailboxes
with different clients. So for example:
..
mailbox Sent {
auto = create
special_use = \Sent
}
mailbox "Sent Messages" {
special_use = \Sent
alias_for = Sent
}
..
If "Sent Messages" doesn't exist:
- DELETE Sent works as usual
- RENAME Sent works as usual
If "Sent Messages" is created:
- it's symlinked to Sent
- DELETE "Sent messages" deletes the symlink, not the contents
- RENAME "Sent messages" isn't allowed
- DELETE/RENAME Sent fails with message: Delete/Rename for Sent not allowed
before "Sent Messages" is deleted.
Thoughts?
The main disadvantage is that clients would still see two different mailboxes,
and some would download contents from both of them.
I was thinking about creating some wiki page which could list the best working
configurations and also a client list, which would specify if it supports
SPECIAL-USE and what the default mailbox names it uses are.
