IMAP ANNOTATE Extension RFC5257: priority on roadmap

[Timo Sirainen]

On 21 Mar 2015, at 10:14, Florian Sager <sager at agitos.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi Timo,
> 
> congrats to the merger with OX.
> 
> Currently the implementation of RFC 5257, ANNOTATE-EXPERIMENT-1, has
> only low priority on http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Roadmap
> I want to explain a scenario that would benefit from annotation support
> to - maybe - increase the priority in your roadmap:
> 
> I'm currently working on a project to publish bank customer related
> documents inside a banking webinterface (they call it 'postbox').
> 
> There are different requirements that would be satisfied very well by an
> IMAP server as data storage/provider for a long term email/document
> archive inside the bank.
> 
> Annotations would be necessary to tag emails with customer numbers and
> document IDs to allow a delayed grouping of several emails by such
> identifiers (message IDs may not be available for references so
> annotations have to be used to compute references indirectly).
> Same for sorting and filtering by customer number or account number.
> 
> I would highly appreciate if you at Dovecot could increase the priority
> of ANNOTATE in your roadmap.

The Roadmap page hasn't been updated for a while now. ANNOTATE is something that I'd like to implement at some point, but it's also quite a large change and likely will have to wait until Dovecot v2.3. You could already implement similar functionality with METADATA, although that would be kind of kludgy. Basically use SETMETADATA folder (/private/vendor/vendor.abcdefg/key/123 "value") where 123 would be the UID. You'd of course somehow need to explicitly delete the metadata entries when messages are expunged.