On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 20:37 +0200, rosenfield.albert@gmail.com wrote:
The configured virtual mailbox would look exactly like a normal mailbox to the client.
The advantage being that Dovecot would index messages in all physical folders for super-fast access when asking via IMAP for messages relating to a specific thread-id. (Hope I got this right.)
That could be one use case, but since no clients do that I doubt it's a very useful one for a while. :) I'm mostly thinking about using virtual mailboxes for custom webmails, at least initially.
In case I wanted to modify the MUA to support better threading and tags/labels, is that enough? Can I simply tell Dovecot via IMAP to create a new virtual folder that aggregates virtual messages from all the other folders and it will start indexing them for thread-locality?
Currently only admin can configure them, but it would be possible to create a new extension for configuring them via IMAP. There are already a couple drafts related to it.
Is it possible to ask Dovecot via IMAP to look for other things in the virtual folder, for example all items with the flag "huey lewis" applied?
Yes (other than spaces not being allowed in flags). It's built using a fully functional IMAP SEARCH query.
Is this sort of query fast / indexed?
Current implementation is a bit slow, but in future it will be fast.