Re: why not use IMAP FLAGS?

[martin f krafft <madduck@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[CC'ing the offlineimap list]
Context: Thomas suggests to use IMAP flags to solve the problems
I highlight in
http://blog.madduck.net/geek/2007.07.24_a-user-space-filesystem-for-mail-labeling

also sprach Thomas Viehmann <tv@xxxxxxxxxx> [2007.07.25.0849 +0200]:
> I don't know about procmail, but AFAIK sieve does. Cyrus used to have a
> delivery option to set flags, but I don't know much about server-side
> filtering (I'm trying to find time to check out sieve properly).
> AFAICT, offlineimap at least deals with the system flags (\\answered et
> al), so it should be fairly easy to deal with custom flags if it doesn't
> already. Flags seem to be the correct way of doing what you want when
> using IMAP, as they're readily available in the basic IMAP RFC
> (RFC3501). Most of what I know about IMAP things I have learned from the
> RFC, wrestling with Cyrus, and looking at Infotrope Polymer[1] and a few
> conversations with the author, David Cridland. (He seems to be one of
> the most clueful people about IMAP so even if I wouldn't use polymer as
> my main mail client, I think it is a reference on how mail should be
> handled. And indeed, he advocates tagging with flags over multiple
> mailboxes.)
> 
> I'm afraid I cannot offer solutions, just random bits of information...

This is, no doubt, interesting; however, even if offlineimap would
learn to support arbitrary flags, how would it represent those on
the filesystem in a way to make mail readers be able to deal with
them in such a way that a sinlge message is never cloned just
because it has multiple tags?

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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