Quoting Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi:
Keywords are *not* meant to be directly viewable by an end-user. Converting between a keyword and the representation displayed to the user is the job of the MUA.
I don't really agree with that though. It's kind of stupid to have
server-side keywords if user still has to configure each client to
specify what they mean. It would have been nice if keywords had been
strings instead of atoms.
I totally agree with this statement. It's just that there isn't any
IMAP standard in place to do this kind of thing. Theoretically you
could do some mapping via the METADATA extension but this won't work
cross-MUA due to the lack of a standard.
Example: in the recently released IMP 5 (shameless plug), we ignore
all non-standard flags or non-known keywords by default since much of
the time the bare keywords aren't all that useful (e.g. $Label1).
There's an option for advanced users to show these raw keywords, but
determination of what keywords go with what label necessarily needs to
be done by the user.
I've been thinking about some day maybe trying to create some kind
of a standard for keywordUTF7 <-> UTF8 translation.
I am all for this. I would be more than willing to help you draft the
standard.
michael