[Dovecot] virtual mailbox / INTHREAD use case, issues, questions

[Ed W]

On 04/01/2010 18:47, David Abrahams wrote:
> For over a year now, I've been trying to acquire the ability to review
> the thread history of a message in my INBOX while still deleting
> messages as soon as I believe I'm done with them.  Suddenly I'm
> gratified to see that several approaches have been right under my nose
> all along!
>
> One is the INTHREAD imap extension, which I see is implemented by
> dovecot.  Another (related) is dovecot's virtual folders.  When I saw
> the
>
>   GMail-style "conversation view"
>
> described at http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual I was elated, so
> I tried it out, with exactly that configuration (almost -- my
> separator is '.').
>    

I have recently just switched my Thunderbird to have sent items in the 
"Inbox" and "in the same folder as the message you are replying to".  
The end result is a fairly workable equivalent of the gmail style thing, 
although you also see Sent messages which haven't had a reply (which may 
or may not be what you desire, but it's actually my preference for my needs)

No need for virtual folders, but support for this to work well may not 
be in every mail client...

Ed W