Re: offlineimap's handling of moving message

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 27 December 2007 2:32:39 am Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> > Not a reliable one.
> >
> > OfflineIMAP would have to have a way to know that a new message that
> > suddenly appeared in a new folder was originally a message with UID x in
> > folder y, and that this message with UID x was still in folder y on the
> > server -- which may not be the case if you had accessed your IMAP box by
> > other means and deleted it.
>
> So long as UIDVALIDITY holds, message with UID x in the folder either
> exists or is gone, but never has different contents.  So the simple way to
> handle this is "Use COPY if possible; if not, fall back to a lame message
> insertion like before".

But the problem is knowing that the message in the *destination* folder had a 
certain UID in the source folder.  How to track that, though?  OfflineIMAP 
currently does it with the Maildir filenames, which clients likely won't 
preserve in this situation.  The other alternative is a header, which also 
gets messy (which OfflineIMAP put that header there?)

> With GMail users of offlineimap, messages get copied and moved all the
> time as I understand it as you add labels to them.

Ah, I didn't realize that.

> To be clear, I'm not saying that it's worth the Johns's time to do it, nor
> that you have an obligation to either me or the GMail users of
> offlineimap, but I wanted to chime in with a different slant.

As always, patches accepted :-)