On 21 Mar 2015, at 10:14, Florian Sager sager@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.