On Thu, 11 Jan 2018, Joseph Tam wrote:
I'd like to configure my dovecot service to use the IMAP SPECIAL-USE extension, but have a few questions for those who have used them, or are knowledgable about its use.
Thanks to all who contributed, even if the answer was "it depends". After configuring it, so far, so good. One of my users did experience some confusion, which answered my question ...
Q2) Will SPECIAL-USE enabled mail clients switch the mailbox used for outgoing mail from whatever it was using (e.g. "Sent Mail") to the (new) special-use mailbox "xxx"?
The answer to this is an emphatic "yes" for some clients (e.g. Mac OS X Mail 11.2). This client will also relabel the actual mailbox "xxx" with its special-use name "Sent", which can cause confusion when discussing which mailbox you're referring to.
One thing I didn't take into account was namespace aliasing: I aliased the former UW imapd namespace (mail/), to conform to the current default namespace (''). However, the special-use configuration did not apply to the aliased namespaces. Will I have to copy all the special-use configuration to all my aliased namespaces, or is there some syntax magic I can use?
By the way, this is the IMAP incantations one can use to test special-use:
C: x2 LIST (SPECIAL-USE) "" %
S: * LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked \Drafts) "/" Drafts
S: * LIST (\NoInferiors \UnMarked \Sent) "/" xxx
S: x2 OK List completed (0.005 + 0.000 + 0.004 secs).
C: x3 LIST (SPECIAL-USE) "mail/" %
S: x3 OK List completed (0.011 + 0.000 + 0.010 secs).Joseph Tam jtam.home@gmail.com