On 11/13/2008, Steffen Kaiser (skdovecot@smail.inf.fh-brs.de) wrote:

I wonder whether the users would accept, if the sent items are located in one specified folder (say "sent-mail"), but the other aliases are "virtual" folders, which are always empty and when a message is placed there, it is placed into the main folder actually. The users (of such badly written IMAP clients, in which you cannot select the actual name of the Sent-Folder) can not use the built-in sent-folder anymore, but need to select one "normal"-looking folder named "sent-mail" explicitly.

Maybe a better way would be to use namespaces? Have an Outlook specific namespace (since it and OE are apparently the buggiest clients in this regard)... then you'd just need to:

1. Have a way to define which folder to use in the namespace, and

2. make sure all of your Outlook clients use the proper namespace.

I *certainly* don't want to be forced to use 'sent-mail' in my Tbird...

--

Best regards,

Charles

May be Outlook is buggy, but your mentioned Thunderbird has it's own issue:

When I want to use german names for a user I setup his mail account with a folder named "Papierkorb" as trash folder (german translation). This can be used with many email clients without problems. But a german Thunderbird wants to create a new folder "Trash" and displays it as "Papierkorb". So what is the result? In Thunderbird I have two folders named as "Papierkorb" where I see in other clients a folder "Trash" and a folder "Papierkorb". (The same applies to sent, draft and templates folders.)

It's 'simply' a translation issue and one of the problems with translating folder names. The same happens with roundcube, and I removed the folder translation code from the source. It's just too confusing for people when they end up with 2 folders that seem to have the same name.

Cor

Steffen Kaiser wrote:

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On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, Daniel L. Miller wrote:

...

I don't if this has been discussed before - or already implemented - but it would be great if I could define one or more "aliases" for a folder. A particular example might be "Sent" where different (badly-written) clients might have hard-coded "Sent" folder locations like "Sent", "Sent Items", "Sent Mail", "Mail Delivered", etc. - and I'd love to get those consolidated.

It would also be nice to show a different set of folders based on the client - or if that's not possible (if the client doesn't identify itself as part of the login sequence) then somehow via login name - maybe by an extension? So where my usual login might be "user@domain.com", and that would continue to be supported as the default login, I could now have "user@domain.com+thunderbird", "user@domain.com+mobile", etc.?

Because the IMAP client does not identify itself, the server does not know, which alias to return to the client. I'm not convinced that the extension method you describe will be widely accepted. "Widely accepted"? Not sure what you meant - or I guess I didn't express myself well. In my own case, for a particular reason that seemed justified at the time, my mail user names are the complete mail address@domain (even though I'm really only doing one domain). My intent was that whatever the user name as defined in the database used by Dovecot - could then have appended or inserted or whatever some identifier flag that Dovecot would use in selecting the folders to share with the client. So I'm asking for a Dovecot-specific modification to be made to Dovecot - followed by implementation instructions for the clients. I wasn't aware of any particular limitations on mail usernames imposed by clients - but if there are, we should certainly that into account.

I definitely would like a solution for this problem as well.

But if the server would return all aliases, most recent clients will at least download all headers from all of them (not knowing about that they are all equal); if the server would return just one alias, the client would assume that its folder has been deleted and redownload the sent message as soon as the folder re-appears.

At a very simple level - so it's system wide, not per-user, would include a database similar to the following:

Default Extension: TBird TBird: -Sent-Items, -Composing, -Posted Mobile: Sent-Items=Sent, Composing=Drafts Mutt: Posted=Sent, Writing=Drafts PMail: Flown=Sent, Droppings=Trash

Now when a client connects, Dovecot parses the username. If no extension is present, Dovecot applies the filters defined as the default. Otherwise, based on the extension, perform the appropriate folder name conversion. The first line I showed goes beyond translation and would allow for specific folder "hiding" based on the client - perhaps if there was a dedicated-purpose folder for a particular client that there is no translation for in other clients (perhaps a special-function junk folder or something).

-- Daniel

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On Thu, 13 Nov 2008, Christian Lange wrote:

Different clients can normally have different sets of folder subscriptions, would that not do what you want?

If you use different devices, e.g. a mobile phone or PDA and Outlook or Thunderbird, you get in troubles, because both may have a very specific view on the folders on IMAP, but the user wants to have all sent mails in one folder, not to mention all deleted mail.

This goes on, if you want to do server-side stuff, e.g. clean the trash-folder now and then etc. Even the trash folder is _not_ fixed by standard. Elder versions of Mozilla and Outlook used localized names for their folders, so even the native language effected the names.

The alias-feature alone will not overcome the problems, because the admin (or user) still needs to configure the aliases for a specific set of mail clients.

Bye,

Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

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On Thu, 13 Nov 2008, Christian Lange wrote:

I am aware of that, but I don't see how that is related to Daniel's second suggestion to show a different set of folders to different clients based on client ID or different login names if that is not possible.

Because this is a client-based configuration.

If people get one conf right, cool; but a configuration based upon brand and version of mail client sounds like crying for support calls, IMHO.

Somebody suggested name spaces, well, I remember the IMAP prefix directory.

Once we used UW-imap serving mails located in the normal home directory of the users. Without the prefix configured right it was just nightmare to answer the support calls like "all my mail folders are gone".

Well, I do understand that it would be most useful if the client would "request" the best view for it.

Bye,

Steffen Kaiser -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

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