Keywords & sync

[Ralf Hildebrandt]

We're using keywords within Thunderbird, and we're syncing those using
IMAP. When using more than 5 keywords, we're envcountering problems -
they're only partially being synced (between two clients, but not all
clients).

Any idea why this could be happening?

The introduction of tagging in Thunderbird is described here:
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114656>

[Robert Schetterer]

Post by Ralf Hildebrandt
We're using keywords within Thunderbird, and we're syncing those using
IMAP. When using more than 5 keywords, we're envcountering problems -
they're only partially being synced (between two clients, but not all
clients).
Any idea why this could be happening?
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114656>

guess you mean this

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Tags

IMAP

Thunderbird tries to store tags on the server using IMAP keywords. If
the IMAP server doesn't support that it will store lags locally in the
.msf file for the folder. That means that another PC can not see the labels.

A quick and dirty way to test where tags are stored would be to exit
Thunderbird and delete the .msf file, and see if the tags disappeared. A
more sophisticated way is to log into the IMAP account and to check
whether the PERMANENTFLAGS server response to the SELECT command
contains \* (see RFC 3501).This page explains how to manually connect to
an IMAP server.




Best Regards
MfG Robert Schetterer

[Steffen]

Post by Robert Schetterer

Post by Ralf Hildebrandt
We're using keywords within Thunderbird, and we're syncing those
using IMAP. When using more than 5 keywords, we're envcountering
problems - they're only partially being synced (between two
clients, but not all clients).
Any idea why this could be happening?
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114656>

guess you mean this
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Tags
IMAP
Thunderbird tries to store tags on the server using IMAP keywords.
If the IMAP server doesn't support that it will store lags locally
in the .msf file for the folder. That means that another PC can not
see the labels.

There is another paragraphe to notice:

"For sharing tags with another PC (or Thunderbird using a different
profile) you need to have defined the same tags to see them.
Thunderbird appears to have hard coded support for five tags that
mimic the old labels."

Did you tested, if all Thunderbirds store the equally named tag with
the same IMAP keyword?


- --
Steffen

[Peter Chiochetti]

Post by Steffen

Post by Robert Schetterer

Post by Ralf Hildebrandt
We're using keywords within Thunderbird, and we're syncing those
using IMAP. When using more than 5 keywords, we're envcountering
problems - they're only partially being synced (between two
clients, but not all clients).

guess you mean this
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Tags
IMAP
Thunderbird tries to store tags on the server using IMAP keywords.
If the IMAP server doesn't support that it will store lags locally
in the .msf file for the folder. That means that another PC can not
see the labels.

"For sharing tags with another PC (or Thunderbird using a different
profile) you need to have defined the same tags to see them.
Thunderbird appears to have hard coded support for five tags that
mimic the old labels."

Steffen is spot on: only the computer, where you create a tag, will
display the new tag. If a tag with the same number but another label
exists there, it will show a different label.

The tag is stored on the server, but it will not sync labels to other
clients!

Besides, dovecot is probably limited to 26 tags (letters of the alphabet).

PS: I really liked to see a feature to limitlessly tag messages with
arbitrary text strings from a synced, easily extensible vocubulary :)
But storing them as headers might go against the idea of IMAP, to keep
message pristine, storing them extra makes much buro-cracy, oh my!

[Steffen Kaiser]

Post by Peter Chiochetti
Besides, dovecot is probably limited to 26 tags (letters of the alphabet).

Partially, other ones are storred in index files, which are lost, if you
need to remove them because of an mailbox corruption.

Post by Peter Chiochetti
PS: I really liked to see a feature to limitlessly tag messages with
arbitrary text strings from a synced, easily extensible vocubulary :) But
storing them as headers might go against the idea of IMAP, to keep message
pristine, storing them extra makes much buro-cracy, oh my!

See, IMAP ANNOTATE rfc5257:

"this can be used to attach comments and other useful
information to a message. It is also possible to attach annotations
to specific parts of a message, so that, for example, they could be
marked as seen, or important, or a comment added.
"

this seems to be the last post about it:
http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2013-February/140526.html

There probably is a working metadata plugin for Dovecot:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.dovecot/72702
http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-metadata-plugin

this plugin seems to support annotatemore:
http://vman.de/cyrus/draft-daboo-imap-annotatemore-07.html

- --
Steffen Kaiser

[Timo Sirainen]

Post by Steffen Kaiser

PS: I really liked to see a feature to limitlessly tag messages with arbitrary text strings from a synced, easily extensible vocubulary :) But storing them as headers might go against the idea of IMAP, to keep message pristine, storing them extra makes much buro-cracy, oh my!

"this can be used to attach comments and other useful
information to a message. It is also possible to attach annotations
to specific parts of a message, so that, for example, they could be
marked as seen, or important, or a comment added.
"
http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2013-February/140526.html
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.dovecot/72702
http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-metadata-plugin

Newer v2.2.x supports METADATA internally, no need for external plugins. It also supports dsync, ACLs and IMAP commands as mentioned in the first mail. What is still missing is some kind of a quota support, but if you're not too worried about that you can already enable it.

Anyway, RFC 5257 is ANNOTATE which is different from METADATA. That is still not implemented by any plugin and its core functionality is also still missing from Dovecot's lib-storage. If you really want to implement it in a quick and dirty way you could use the mailbox METADATA entries to do it by using the IMAP UIDs as part of the mailbox METADATA entry names. Those don't get automatically deleted when mails are expunged, and could have some other problems, but basically it would work..