Hi,
currently most people store their messages in some sort of folder hierarchy, so that they can find them later easily. Here, for example, mails that are connected to a project are being stored in /CompanyName/ProjectNumber folders.
Now I was wondering if there is any reason against using tags instead of a folder hierarchy, because tags are better when it comes to mails that belong to multiple projects (maybe even belonging to multiple companies) at once. All mails could then be stored in one folder/mailbox, fulltext search indexing would work well. You could search for a tag that consists of the ProjectNumber and would get all mails that belong to that project, just as if you would have opened that folder in the old hierarchy. You could save this search as a 'Search Folder' (talking in Thunderbird terms).
Then I looked at how Thunderbird implements those tags when using IMAP. It stores them as IMAP keywords. Dovecot stores the first 26 flags in the filename, because it will only use one letter. Mapping between client's tag name and the letter is being done in dovecot-keywords files (one for each mailbox). If there are more IMAP keywords than 26, they will be stored in the dovecot.index file. (http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir)
Now imagine we want to have 1000s (maybe 10000s) of different tags (=IMAP keywords) - instead of folders. Can this be recommended? What happens if the index file gets corrupted for some reason? (I had to delete dovecot.index files before...). What happens if the Thunderbird profile breaks? What happens if we want to move on to another client?
Are there other ways to implement 'tagging' instead of a hierarchy?
Patrick.
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