Hi Sean, I was expecting somebody else to reply in this but since I'm not seeing anyone doing so, I'll give it a shot. I only recently discovered sup, and I'm not a Ruby programmer, however I got quite a bunch of experience with Python (now the rest of the mailing list can proceed flaming me). The following post is purely speculative.
Shortly put, I don't expect to see any change on this matter, at least in the near future. There is and has been a tool, sup-sync-back which should reflect the changes back to mbox/maildir but the way it works is far from ideal, I guess. Anyway.. Let's get one thing straight first, sup doesn't really use specific status flags/tags or such for mails. Instead, every piece of information is in the labels. A couple of labels are predefined: Attachment, Deleted, Draft, Inbox, Killed, Sent, Spam, Starred and Unread. Technically, a message that is archived is simply lacking the label "Inbox". Rest of the labels are user-defined. Standard maildir format already provides following flags by default: (S)een, (T)rashed, (D)raft. In addition flags that sup doesn't need; Passed, Replied and Flagged. Dovecot (an IMAP server) provides user defined flags for maildirs. The flags are lowercase letters ranging a-z (up to 26 different), and seems like it works OK with the maildir. ( http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir ). This could be one nice option if a limit of some 20 user tags aren't too few. Example maildir mail flags: :2,Sacd S - standard maildir flag: Seen, MUA would label as "Read" a - custom flag - MUA would label as "Archived" b - custom flag - MUA would label as "Starred" d - custom flag - User would label as "Work" This is of course kinda opposite to sup's current situation where messages are defined as Unread or Inbox, but anyway.. Personally I don't like the idea of MUA messing up with the email headers as you suggested. Plus, this would result in a lot of fragmentation on a hard disk with tens of thousands of emails, if on initial sync sup would need to write label information in the middle of every email. And as always when writing, there's a risk of data loss, which would require additional measures. This area interests me, however, and I guess I'm gonna make some experiments how the flagging thing works in action, and if it makes other mail clients break. (I doubt it does, otherwise Dovecot wouldn't be using it, huh?). Regards, Matti _______________________________________________ Sup-devel mailing list Sup-devel@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/sup-devel
