[Dovecot] Using tags instead of folders?

[Patrick Nagel]

Hi,

currently most people store their messages in some sort of folder hierarchy, 
so that they can find them later easily. Here, for example, mails that are 
connected to a project are being stored in /CompanyName/ProjectNumber 
folders.

Now I was wondering if there is any reason against using tags instead of a 
folder hierarchy, because tags are better when it comes to mails that belong 
to multiple projects (maybe even belonging to multiple companies) at once. 
All mails could then be stored in one folder/mailbox, fulltext search 
indexing would work well. You could search for a tag that consists of the 
ProjectNumber and would get all mails that belong to that project, just as if 
you would have opened that folder in the old hierarchy. You could save this 
search as a 'Search Folder' (talking in Thunderbird terms).

Then I looked at how Thunderbird implements those tags when using IMAP. It 
stores them as IMAP keywords. Dovecot stores the first 26 flags in the 
filename, because it will only use one letter. Mapping between client's tag 
name and the letter is being done in dovecot-keywords files (one for each 
mailbox). If there are more IMAP keywords than 26, they will be stored in the 
dovecot.index file. (http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir)

Now imagine we want to have 1000s (maybe 10000s) of different tags (=IMAP 
keywords) - instead of folders. Can this be recommended? What happens if the 
index file gets corrupted for some reason? (I had to delete dovecot.index 
files before...). What happens if the Thunderbird profile breaks? What 
happens if we want to move on to another client?

Are there other ways to implement 'tagging' instead of a hierarchy?

Patrick.

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