[Dovecot] UTF-8 mailbox names in filesystem

[Laurent Blume]

Quoting Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi>:
> Currently mailbox names are stored in IMAP's modified-UTF-7 format in
> filesystem. I was wondering about changing this in v2.0. The default
> would still be to use mUTF-7 in filesystem, but just adding :UTF8 or
> something to mail_location could enable UTF-8.
>
> Any thoughts? Could this be dangerous somehow? UTF-8 enables a lot of
> weird characters, perhaps no one really wants to see them on filesystem
> since there's no way to type the characters? But for small systems this
> probably isn't a problem.

I would personally find it useful. I use accented and Chinese  
characters, and I've worked in environments where they were common as  
well. Having a common name between MUA and FS would certainly be nice.

As for the risks, maybe some Unicode ranges could be restricted to  
avoid control characters and such? Or limit the use to given subsets?
It might be useful as well to be able to enable it on a per-user basis.
Would that add too much complexity?

I think of it as a nice feature, but not a critical one.

Laurent