Quoting Louis-David Mitterrand vindex+lists-dovecot@apartia.org:

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:25:49PM +0100, Oliver Eales wrote:

...

Am 13.03.2010 um 11:26 schrieb Louis-David Mitterrand:

...

Hi,

Does dovecot support in-place attachement deletion?

Mutt currently uploads a new message after deleting attachements. Is there a better, imap way to do it?

Hello, no, this is the IMAP way to do it. Via IMAP you can't modify a message, only its attributes (flags)

On the mutt-dev list someone pointed out the APPEND spec from the IMAP4rev1 standard:

If a date-time is specified, the internal date SHOULD be set in the resulting message; otherwise, the internal date of the resulting message is set to the current date and time by default.

Does dovecot honor a date-time passed during APPEND?

The better solution is the CATENATE (RFC 4469) extension, if
available. An example directly from Appendix A of that RFC:

 Example 3: The following example demonstrates how the CATENATE
 extension can be used to strip attachments.  Below, a PowerPoint
 attachment was replaced by a small text part explaining that the
 attachment was stripped.

 C: A003 APPEND Drafts (\Seen \Draft $MDNSent) CATENATE
  (URL "/Drafts;UIDVALIDITY=385759045/;UID=21/;section=HEADER"
  TEXT {42}
 S: + Ready for literal data
 C:
 C: --------------030308070208000400050903
 C:  URL "/Drafts;UIDVALIDITY=385759045/;UID=21/;section=1.MIME"
  URL "/Drafts;UIDVALIDITY=385759045/;UID=21/;section=1" TEXT {255}
 S: + Ready for literal data
 C:
 C: --------------030308070208000400050903
 C: Content-type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
 C: Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
 C:
 C: This body part contained a Power Point presentation that was
 C: deleted upon your request.
 C: --------------030308070208000400050903--
 C: )
 S: A003 OK append Completed

michael