For over a year now, I've been trying to acquire the ability to review the thread history of a message in my INBOX while still deleting messages as soon as I believe I'm done with them. Suddenly I'm gratified to see that several approaches have been right under my nose all along!
One is the INTHREAD imap extension, which I see is implemented by dovecot. Another (related) is dovecot's virtual folders. When I saw the
GMail-style "conversation view"
described at http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual I was elated, so I tried it out, with exactly that configuration (almost -- my separator is '.').
I ran into several problems (using Dovecot 1.2.8 with http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-1.2/rev/9cccb8617820 applied):
I had to manually create the virtual folder for all my users or they couldn't access their mail at all. Is this fixed in 2.0?
My users were getting errors when accessing via POP3. The possible meaning of such a virtual folder under POP3 is lost on me, but I had to enable the virtual plugin for that protocol too. I think that should at least be in the documentation, or better yet the requirement should that it be enabled for POP3 should be dropped.
I couldn't get the virtual "conversation view" inbox to show any messages. But maybe that's because of a possible issue I describe below with x-mailbox
At some point I ended up with an empty mailbox called "private.virtual" --- I have no idea how. Probably user error.
The "all" virtual mailbox would only show 89 messages. I switched it to be a mirror of my "archive" mailbox and the number started to look more reasonable. This could be the "lots of mailboxes" bug describe in http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2009-December/000145.html
I got the impression that looking at the virtual INBOX didn't cause the "all" mailbox to be updated, which I'd guess that it should be.
I tried to create an IMAP search, rather than a virtual folder, that looked for x-mailbox INBOX header like the virtual folder does. It too came up empty. It doesn't exactly surprise me because I don't see an x-mailbox header in any of these messages. In fact, I can't find one in /any/ of my messages. When I look for a description of the x-mailbox header, I don't find much information on where it comes from or what it represents. http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2009-June/040619.html seems to indicate it's synthesized by the server. If it's really supposed to represent the message's "original" mailbox as implied by http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual then I'm not sure what that means for messages that are filed twice by sieve and never moved.
Lastly, I want to report that for me, the speed of these IMAP searches doesn't begin to approach what I can do with mairix if I want a message's entire thread. I'm happy to use mairix, although it would be nicer not to duplicate that capability if it's already in the server. But it needs to be fast. Is there something I can do to make it go faster?
Thanks in advance for any advice, hints, fixes, workarounds, etc.
-- Dave Abrahams Meet me at BoostCon: http://www.boostcon.com BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com