[Dovecot] Manual thread breaking from Thunderbird

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 20:37 +0200, rosenfield.albert at gmail.com wrote:
> > The configured virtual mailbox would look exactly
> > like a normal mailbox  to the client.
> 
> The advantage being that Dovecot would index messages in all physical
> folders for super-fast access when asking via IMAP for messages
> relating to a specific thread-id.  (Hope I got this right.)

That could be one use case, but since no clients do that I doubt it's a
very useful one for a while. :) I'm mostly thinking about using virtual
mailboxes for custom webmails, at least initially.

> In case I wanted to modify the MUA to support better threading and
> tags/labels, is that enough?  Can I simply tell Dovecot via IMAP to
> create a new virtual folder that aggregates virtual messages from all
> the other folders and it will start indexing them for thread-locality?

Currently only admin can configure them, but it would be possible to
create a new extension for configuring them via IMAP. There are already
a couple drafts related to it.

> Is it possible to ask Dovecot via IMAP to look for other things in the
> virtual folder, for example all items with the flag "huey lewis"
> applied?  

Yes (other than spaces not being allowed in flags). It's built using a
fully functional IMAP SEARCH query.

> Is this sort of query fast / indexed?

Current implementation is a bit slow, but in future it will be fast.
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