[Dovecot] Establing a GMail like workflow

[Florian Lindner]

Hello!

I'm about to migrate my mails from GMail back to my self hosted
solution, using Dovecot imap server.

I really liked gmail workflow:

- (Almost) all mail goes to inbox.
- Most mail is read and not important anymore, it is archived and
moved to "all messages".
- Inbox stays more or less clean, with only mails that are still of
some interest.
- Mail (except Spam) is never deleted, just archived.

How can I achieve such a workflow using Dovecot and some MUA
(Roundcube and probably KMail).

- I can simply delete messages that I want to archive, Trash will
never be purged. Problems: Some mail clients have settings like "Purge
Trash at exit", so my mail is always in danger of being deleted
accidently. Futhermore it does not really have the semantics of what I
am actually doing.

- Instead of deleting messages for archiving, move them to some Archiv
folder. Since archiving is a very frequent action this involves much
more cliks in the MUA than just deleting. Or some configuration change
in the client.

How would you do that? I'm also open to entirely different
suggestions! What I want are basically these things:
- Never delete legitimate mail
- Use the Inbox as a workspace for mails that are still of some
interest. This can also be quite old mail, time based archiving does
not work.
- Have some kind of mail archive.

Thanks!

Florian