Quoting Timo Sirainen <t...@iki.fi>:
On 27.3.2013, at 5.15, Pablo Vieira <pa...@vieira.es> wrote:
On this post http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2011-June/059605.html I
was asking about the possibility of using arbitrary labels on messages,
much like Gmail does. On following replies, I was told about few tricks
that might be used, that the IMAP protocol was being considering UTF-8
labels and ways to integrate them into the current system, etc., etc., etc.
That sounds nice and all.
I'm chiming in three years later only to know if things have changed, both
at Dovecot and at the IMAP protocol. Are we closer to have proper labels on
IMAP? Labels that help sorting messages in virtual folders where a message
can belong in several of them?
My latest idea: Keep using the rather dummy simple IMAP keywords.
Use IMAP METADATA to create a mapping between keyword <-> human
readable name. Dovecot is getting close to having native METADATA
support. Such IMAP standard would still need to be designed though.
Anyone up for writing an RFC? :)
Would the idea be that once the extension is announced a client would
then need to do a metadata lookup everytime you open the mailbox to
build a keyword->label map? That could potentially be an expensive
operation.
Maybe you could do something like an ENABLE LABELS so that when you
open a mailbox, you would see something like this (SELECT/EXAMINE
response):
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft foo1 foo2 Junk NonJunk)
* LABELS (NIL NIL NIL NIL NIL "Label 1" "Label 2 Text" NIL NIL)
So there is no need to manually deal with lookups. Storing the labels
would be done via standard METADATA commands.
michael
