[Dovecot] Filenames and flags

[Timo Sirainen]

On Sat, 2005-05-28 at 10:29 +0200, Jon wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Does anyone know how the filnames as created and/or if you can read a
> mail's flag or status from it?

I'm guessing you're running 0.99.x Dovecot with maildir?

> 1 .As you can set i.e. "ToDo" label on a message and then if I open from
> another thunderbird  I can see it  is marked there aswell I wonder: Is
> this read from the filename or some registry?

I think Thunderbird uses $Label1 or something like that to name them in
server side. So Dovecot doesn't see "ToDo", but instead that $Label1.

Dovecot then stores the $Label1 to .customflags file and gives it the
next available number. The number then tells what flag number in maildir
filename is used, eg. 0 = 'a', 1 = 'b', etc.

So the lower case letters in maildir filename tell what custom flags
("keywords" is the correct term actually for them) are set.

> 2 .Can I understand from a filename if a message is read?

Yes. It has 'R' flag set. See http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html

> 3. Sometimes when I try to filter with flags no messages show. Is this a
> thunderbird bug or a dovecot one, or one in conjunction?

I don't know.. 0.99.x Dovecot can have some bugs though, with 1.0-stable
and 1.0-tests it might work better (but I don't use Thunderbird, so I
don't know).

BTW. With 1.0-stable the keywords aren't stored at all in server side.
With 1.0-tests they are, but with Maildir they are currently stored only
in index files, not to maildir filenames themselves. I should fix that.

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