On 2021-07-15 20:25:41 (+0800), Greg Earle wrote:
I'm trying to migrate my mail server at work and have come across
something I don't understand.
If I mark messages in my work e-mail account (in MailMate) with
red/yellow/green etc., MailMate running on my home Mac and my work Mac
correctly see the colors.
Also, if I run Apple Mail on either my home Mac or my work Mac, they
also correctly see the colors on both systems. This made me think at
first that the flag color information must be in the filename if not
metadata in the message file itself.
But if I rsync my Maildirs from my old Ops mail server (Courier) to my
new Dev mail server (Postfix+Dovecot), both MailMate and Apple Mail
see every flagged message on the new server as being red - all the
yellow/green/etc. color differential/subtlety is getting lost
somewhere.
I verified that the mail message files have the same exact filename,
size and checksum on both servers - so clearly the flag color can't be
kept in the file or the filename?
I don't get it - how do Apple Mail and MailMate know about each
other's colors (yes I know MailMate implements Apple Mail's flag
setup), but if you copy the message to a different server and it's
correctly preserved, the color information is lost?
tl;dr: Where do MailMate/Apple Mail store the flag color info for each
message?
Both MailMate and Apple Mail store their flags as IMAP keywords.
Apparently they agree on which keywords to use for which colours.
Dovecot stores the keywords as letters in the filename and uses a
dovecot-keywords file in the Maildir to map those letters to IMAP
keywords. Courier stores the keywords in a file per flagged message in
a courierimapkeywords directory in the Maildir.
https://doc.dovecot.org/admin_manual/mailbox_formats/maildir/
http://www.courier-mta.org/imap/README.imapkeywords.html
Both implementations set \Flagged, so without further information,
you'll see the generic colour flag on the messages you rsynced.
You'll have to construct a dovecot-keywords file from the
courierimapkeywords to get the colours back. I once wrote a script to
do something very similar to this ... but I don't seem to have it
anymore. I don't remember it being very difficult to write though.
I hope this helps.
Philip
--
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Alternative Enterprises
_______________________________________________
mailmate mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.freron.com/listinfo/mailmate
