[Dovecot] RFE: IMAP LIST Extension for Special-Use Mailboxes

[Timo Sirainen]

On 26.6.2012, at 18.54, Charles Marcus wrote:

> My question (I guess for Timo) is, would it be crazy/possible to implement some kind of 'alias' conversion in dovecot that would work regardless of client cooperation?
> 
> Ie, in a config file, add a list of 'aliases' for these special use folders (similar to how it is done now), but where dovecot would then silently translate/map a request for any of the defined aliases to the defined special use folder? so, if Outlook wants to save a sent message to 'Sent Items', it would simply and silently be saved to 'Sent' (or whatever the admin had defined as the 'real' sent folder). This wouldn't then require anything to be implemented in a client, it would only require the Admin to know what clients they want to support and what folders those clients look for by default.

There would be two possibilities:

1) Have aliases where the alias is visible with LIST and all other commands. Most clients will then show that mailbox duplicated with two names, probably causing user confusion.

2) Have aliases where the alias isn't visible with LIST, but it would be possible to APPEND/COPY messages there, or CREATE, SELECT, etc. I have no idea how different clients would behave with this behavior. Might work with some, or might not..

You can kind of emulate 2) behavior and see what happens by setting up namespaces like:

namespace {
  prefix =
  separator = /
  inbox = yes
  list = no
  hidden = no
}
namespace {
  prefix = RealMails/
  separator = /
  list = no
  hidden = yes
}
# I think there needs to be one list=yes namespace:
namespace {
  prefix = something/
  separator = /
  list = yes
  hidden = yes
  location = mbox:/var/lib/dovecot/empty
}

Anyway you could see if clients show the Drafts/Sent etc. mailboxes that they create and allows actually accessing them.