[Dovecot] Using tags instead of folders?
Patrick Nagel
patrick.nagel at star-group.net
Wed Jul 2 10:56:44 EEST 2008
Hi,
currently most people store their messages in some sort of folder hierarchy,
so that they can find them later easily. Here, for example, mails that are
connected to a project are being stored in /CompanyName/ProjectNumber
folders.
Now I was wondering if there is any reason against using tags instead of a
folder hierarchy, because tags are better when it comes to mails that belong
to multiple projects (maybe even belonging to multiple companies) at once.
All mails could then be stored in one folder/mailbox, fulltext search
indexing would work well. You could search for a tag that consists of the
ProjectNumber and would get all mails that belong to that project, just as if
you would have opened that folder in the old hierarchy. You could save this
search as a 'Search Folder' (talking in Thunderbird terms).
Then I looked at how Thunderbird implements those tags when using IMAP. It
stores them as IMAP keywords. Dovecot stores the first 26 flags in the
filename, because it will only use one letter. Mapping between client's tag
name and the letter is being done in dovecot-keywords files (one for each
mailbox). If there are more IMAP keywords than 26, they will be stored in the
dovecot.index file. (http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir)
Now imagine we want to have 1000s (maybe 10000s) of different tags (=IMAP
keywords) - instead of folders. Can this be recommended? What happens if the
index file gets corrupted for some reason? (I had to delete dovecot.index
files before...). What happens if the Thunderbird profile breaks? What
happens if we want to move on to another client?
Are there other ways to implement 'tagging' instead of a hierarchy?
Patrick.
--
STAR Software (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. http://www.star-group.net/
Phone: +86 (21) 3462 7688 x 826 Fax: +86 (21) 3462 7779
PGP key: https://stshacom1.star-china.net/keys/patrick_nagel.asc
Fingerprint: E09A D65E 855F B334 E5C3 5386 EF23 20FC E883 A005
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
Url : http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20080702/acc66a42/attachment.bin
More information about the dovecot
mailing list