I realize (having read the RFC), that IMAP does not deal with the envelope "From " at all. I also realize that IMAP calls something else the "envelope", so I'll refer to it as the Unix (mbox) "From " line.
However, the mbox format does store those lines, and they even still have some meaning. If users access their mailboxes both through IMAP and through mbox files in ~/mail/ (e.g. elm/mutt/pine/mail -f), (which I assume is a rather common deployment given the option of storing mail in mbox files, and anyway is the idea in my intended deployment) compatibility should be preserved wherever possible.
When storing (copying/moving) a message from one mbox to another (using the IMAP COPY command), wouldn't it make more sense for dovecot to copy the entire message block, including the "From " line at the beginning, instead of inventing/writing its own (phony) "From <username>@<server>..." line and copying only the rest?
I tried to see if I can patch dovecot to the expected logical behaviour, however from the little I looked, I got a bit overwhelmed and confused by all the structs, with the mail_save_context and istream stuff. The only simple/trivial thing I could is have it, when copying a message, given the pointer to the data in the stream, search backward for a "From " line and copy from there. That seems not to be the most elegant solution...
So, any help with getting my expected behaviour from dovecot is still appreciated...
Thanks, -- Tom
On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 12:40:58AM +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Fri, 2004-04-23 at 13:48, Tom Alsberg wrote:
Hi there.
I am evaluating Dovecot as an IMAP server. I noticed on thing which irritates me. When a user saves a message to an IMAP folder with the Dovecot server, the envelope From line is changed to the address of that user, instead of keeping the From line of the original message.
How can I have the original envelope From line preserved when saving messages?
I'm not quite sure what you mean. The mbox From-line? From where should it keep it? IMAP protocol doesn't provide IMAP server that information, so Dovecot just adds the user name.
-- Tom Alsberg - hacker (being the best description fitting this space) Web page: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~alsbergt/ DISCLAIMER: The above message does not even necessarily represent what my fingers have typed on the keyboard, save anything further.