[Dovecot] Folder Aliases - Revisited Yet Again

[Timo Sirainen]

On Thu, 2010-08-12 at 17:04 -0700, Daniel L. Miller wrote:
> If we can't get clients to agree on a "standard" set of folders 
> (probably reasonably safe assumption) 

Actually that assumption might go away :) Google implemented XLIST
extension for GMail that flags the special mailboxes. iPhone at least
supports that, possibly some others too. Now morg group is trying to get
that standardized, and Google has promised to implement it also:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-morg-list-specialuse-02

> and if protocol implementations of 
> variations of "*LIST*" are too far in the future...what about having 
> alternative folder names presented based on login name - maybe by an 
> extension?  So where my usual login might be "user at domain.com", and that 
> would continue to be supported as the default login, I could now have 
> "user at domain.com+thunderbird", "user at domain.com+mobile", etc.?

This part can already be done with some passdbs and userdbs. You just
need to have the userdb return some client=thunderbird/mobile/etc extra
field.

> And each of those extensions would then have a system-wide map defining 
> folder name relationships, like "Sent=Sent Items".  Does this seem doable?

This is more troublesome.. You could probably hack something horrible by
having each client use a different maildir and use symlinks. Or I guess
you could also create listescape-like plugin that changes some mailbox
names. Hmm. Yeah, that might work.

I'm kind of annoyed with listescape though. Hopefully for v2.1 I can
figure out some API changes to make it much easier to modify mailbox
names, and I guess also make such aliasing plugin much easier to
implement.