[Dovecot] Order of emails

[Marcus Don]

Hi

We have an issue regarding the order in which emails are displayed in an
imap folder, which our customers regularly complain about. By default,
emails are returned from a folder in the order in which they were placed
into the folder, which makes perfect sense. However, if an email is moved
into another folder, it will always appear at the top, no matter how old it
is.

We could order the emails ourselves before displaying them in our webmail
program. However, this would mean parsing the headers of every single email,
which could be many thousands, so would slow things down considerably and
greatly increase load. At the moment, we only read 30 at a time as the user
pages through the folder.

>From what I can see, the order is determined by the timestamp in the email
filename, which gets updated every time the email is moved. Is there any way
we could disable this, so the filename (or at least the timestamp part of
it) remains constant? If so, would this affect in any way the behaviour of
other imap clients, such as Outlook?

All suggestions welcome.

Thanks

Marcus
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Marcus Don
Applications Development Manager
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