[Dovecot] preserving \Recent when moving messages

[Mark Hedges]

Is there any way to preserve \Recent, or am I out of luck?

Some people have reported that my script which shuffles
around expired or oversized mail also causes their clients
to report it as already read.  I guess those clients check
\Recent instead of \Seen when they download.  I wish I knew
which clients.

With Mail::IMAPClient I tried using move(), copy(), and
migrate() but the result is the same-- once it looks at the
source message, \Recent is gone.  (I tried patching it where
it greps out the \Recent flag before appending the messages,
but that causes a silent error.)

Directly appending to the destination folder does not help
either, since I would lose any flags set by the user, and if
I tried to preserve those, then I would lose the \Recent
flag when I read through the destination folder to figure
out which messages were which.

RFC5301 says \Recent can never be set... but does its
prohibition include the case of migrating mail, where the
intent is to retain them intact?  It would be nice if
Dovecot offered a migration feature which would move a
message from folder to folder without unsetting \Recent.

Mark