Is atomic MOVING of messages between IMAP folders possible?

[Timo Sirainen]

On 04 Aug 2014, at 10:44, Greg Sullivan <greg.sullivan at sullivang.net> wrote:

> I would like to use a shared IMAP account, with multiple users accessing it
> simultaneously.  The users would take ownership of messages by first
> attempting to MOVE the messages from the Inbox,  into their private IMAP
> folder, still within the same account. Now, since there will be multiple
> users competing for the same messages, I naturally want only ONE of the
> simultaneous moves to be successful at a time.
> 
> So far, this isn't working. If I do the move from two clients,
> simultaneously, the messages can go to *both *destination folders -
> duplicates can result.
> 
> Is it possible to configure Dovecot and/or an IMAP client to behave the way
> I want it to? If the answer to this is YES, then I'll offer my config
> details. If the answer is NO, the next question is - do any email systems
> at all behave the way I want? (I tried a hosted Exchange/OWA service - it
> has the same problem)

Dovecot doesn't even attempt to do atomic MOVEs. I don't think any server will. If you can change the client code, you could use CONDSTORE instead, which does give atomic STOREs.