Anders writes:
HiIs there any way with Courier IMAP to implement server-side virtual folders based on meta keywords, such as the Search Folders in Thunderbird or Outlook?
The short answer is: no.
I guess one way to do this would be using symbolic/hard links between various emails and folders. But that would not be easy to set-up in a safe way (what if a user moves email, etc).
Now that part is not really an issue. Hard links are fine. An IMAP server never writes into an existing file.
What you really want to do here is that any time a mail gets delivered to a mailbox, search it, and move/hard link the message file into one or more additional folders.
An IMAP server provides access to mail in existing folders. How mail gets there is not something that it really cares about. So, this would not be in scope of the IMAP server. A side issue is how to manage these folders.
I suppose you could have the IMAP server create and delete these folders. I suppose you can create a folder called "INBOX.Labels.Fizzbin". The IMAP server will create this folder.
Then, I suppose you can install a mail delivery agent that automatically knows about folders, and I suppose you can have it look at all INBOX.Labels.<label> folders, take all of them, all of their keywords, and automatically hardlink each message that it delivers to the mailbox into the appropriate folder.
I suppose that's technically doable. There are a couple of side issues to consider. Namely locking – making sure that things don't fall apart when the IMAP server tries to delete a Labels folder that something is about to be hardlinked into. Also, an IMAP client can manually upload a message into a server's folder, this is used mainly by IMAP clients to save a copy of sent mail, in the sent mails folder. This would short-circuit the mail delivery agent altogether.
And of course there's the issue of searching itself, to consider. Searching is a mess. You have MIME encoding issues to consider (quoted printable), and character set transcoding (if you are searching using the UTF-8 codeset, you certainly want to be able to find your keyword in a message that uses the ISO-8859-15 codeset). Not to mention that there two separate encoding standards for non-Latin characters in mail headers, depending on which mail header it is.
So, again, the short answer is no. Technically, it's possible. Everything is possible, given enough free time, and incentive. But, for now, it's no.
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