[Dovecot] Defer emails until the user is ready to deal with them (snooze button / bring-forward file / bring-up file for emails)

[Timo Sirainen]

On Sat, 2013-02-16 at 12:44 +0100, Chris Laif wrote:
> Hi, I would like to add a feature to my email-client (Thunderbird)
> which stops emails from showing up until a specific time (e.g. having
> buttons for: show again this evening, tomorrow, next week, next month
> ...).
> 
> As far as I've learned this is not possible with IMAP:
> - storing the 'do-not-show-until-time' within a custom header-field
> requires down- and uploading of the whole email and therefore causes
> problems especially with large emails
> - IMAP keywords are limited are limited in quantity and can not be
> compared with datetime functions

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5257 could be used for this. Of course,
Dovecot doesn't support it, and it's not easy to implement efficiently.

Probably not too difficult to implement inefficiently with v2.2's
mailbox_attribute_* API. Just create /annotations/<uid>/<key> mailbox
attributes and delete them when the mails get expunged..