[Dovecot] Folder aliases

[Steffen Kaiser]

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On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Daniel L. Miller wrote:

> I don't if this has been discussed before - or already implemented - but it 
> would be great if I could define one or more "aliases" for a folder.  A 
> particular example might be "Sent" where different (badly-written) clients 
> might have hard-coded "Sent" folder locations like "Sent", "Sent Items", 
> "Sent Mail", "Mail Delivered", etc. - and I'd love to get those consolidated.
>
> It would also be nice to show a different set of folders based on the client 
> - or if that's not possible (if the client doesn't identify itself as part of 
> the login sequence) then somehow via login name - maybe by an extension?  So 
> where my usual login might be "user at domain.com", and that would continue to 
> be supported as the default login, I could now have 
> "user at domain.com+thunderbird", "user at domain.com+mobile", etc.?

Because the IMAP client does not identify itself, the server does not 
know, which alias to return to the client. I'm not convinced that the 
extension method you describe will be widely accepted.

I definitely would like a solution for this problem as well.

But if the server would return all aliases, most recent clients will at 
least download all headers from all of them (not knowing about that they 
are all equal); if the server would return just one alias, the client 
would assume that its folder has been deleted and redownload the sent 
message as soon as the folder re-appears.

I wonder whether the users would accept, if the sent items are located in 
one specified folder (say "sent-mail"), but the other aliases are 
"virtual" folders, which are always empty and when a message is placed 
there, it is placed into the main folder actually. The users (of such 
badly written IMAP clients, in which you cannot select the actual name of 
the Sent-Folder) can not use the built-in sent-folder anymore, but need to 
select one "normal"-looking folder named "sent-mail" explicitly.

Bye,

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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