[Dovecot] manipulating mails

[Sven]

Thanks a lot, Steffen.
Sounds like some work. Catch your free beer(s) if you touch Frankfurt.
Sven


Steffen Kaiser schrieb:
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> On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Sven wrote:
>
>> i want to move mails from some specific imap folder to some other 
>> folder on the filesystem to precess them further more.
>> but maybe i want to copy the mail and then set the seen flag.
>> i think both can be done via imap,
>> but maybe i want to add some tag/keyword, text or attachment from 
>> some processing skript with processing informations
>> thinks getting more complex ...
>
> In IMAP storage messages are immutable, per spec. That means: You 
> cannot transparently change the content of a message, e.g. add/remove 
> headers or (parts of) the body, once the message has been delivered.
>
> If you do it the IMAP way, each manipulated messages (I mean the 
> content, not the keywords/tags/flags) becomes a new message, hence, 
> the clients might download it again.
>
> If you keep that in mind, you can successfully manipulate the content 
> of messages in Maildir by:
>
> 1) rename message somewhere else,
> 2) manipulate it
> 3) rename it to maildir_mailbox/tmp
> 4) adjust access permissions
> 5) rename it to maildir_mailbox/new or ../cur
> making sure the file gets a new filename stem (part of filename before 
> the colon) than it had originally.
>
> If a new file pops up in cur/new, Dovecot assumes a non-Dovecot 
> delivery and re-indexes the file next time the user accesses the mailbox.
>
> To manipulate the flags I would use PREAUTH.
>
> You can savly remove files from a Maildir.
>
> Regards,
>
> - -- Steffen Kaiser
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