[maildropl] maildrop feature request

[Sam Varshavchik]

Hey Sam, et all.
Have there been any news over the years on this front? I.e. the
problem on how to flag mail's as (S)een, (A)nswered, (D)eleted, etc. ?
That seems to pop up every now and then again here, there are probably
countless of blog entries where people complain about that issue :-(

Haven't seen that topic come up in a number of years, actually. I still
think that this is a solution in search of a problem.

It seems there has even been a patch proposed
once:http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.mail.maildrop/4475
Any reason not to merge that or solving that somehow else?
That, plus the issue of the dovecot-authlib patches not having been
merged here and subsequently been dropped from many distros, makes
using maildrop quite difficult. And it seems to me without any
necessity :-/

I am unable to maintain any dovecot code for the simple reason that I don't
use it, and as such I can't maintain it. Someone needs to step up and
volunteer to take ownership the dovecot-specific bits.

[Sam Varshavchik]

Post by Sam Varshavchik

Have there been any news over the years on this front? I.e. the
problem on how to flag mail's as (S)een, (A)nswered, (D)eleted, etc. ?
That seems to pop up every now and then again here, there are probably
countless of blog entries where people complain about that issue :-(

Haven't seen that topic come up in a number of years, actually. I still
think that this is a solution in search of a problem.

There's for example, "[maildropl] Marking a message read when
delivering to a Maildir" right here on the list, from e.g. 2014
And as I've said, countless of blog posts, etc. which deal with that issue.
Also I don't know how you come to idea that this should be the search
of a problem.
Setting these flags seem to be one of the most basic featurs,
supported by sieve, or any MUA's internal filtersystem.
- e.g. automatically (f)lagging messages, based on e.g. From
- when maildrop is e.g. used to automatically reply to certain mails
(via passing them on to some scripts or so), may be desired to have
them marked (A)nswered
- when having high volume mailing lists subscribed, one may want to
mark most messages (S)een since one isn't interested in them, except
those which are e.g. directly To:ed to one self, or which include
certain keywords, etc. pp

Why would delivering messages to the appopriate folder, instead, be a
problem?

Simply delivering the messages to the appropriate folder seems to be a more
useful disposition.

[m***@croatiafidelis.hr]

Post by Sam Varshavchik

- when having high volume mailing lists subscribed, one may want to
mark most messages (S)een since one isn't interested in them, except
those which are e.g. directly To:ed to one self, or which include
certain keywords, etc. pp

Why would delivering messages to the appopriate folder, instead, be a
problem?
Simply delivering the messages to the appropriate folder seems to be a more
useful disposition.

Absolutely so! Works perfectly here!

One of the programs that I'm really happy with is the Maildrop, and I
recommend it to newbies when the talk is about mail. I had tried various
guis (Thunderbird, Claws, Kmail), but would never want to go back again
away from:

Getmail, Maildrop, Mutt, and Postfix (for sending mail only, I'm still
on a provider's/hoster's mail hub). A perfect solution, to me!

( BTW, I'm on a grsecurity-hardened Gentoo, with iptables properly
configured, which, along with the above, is just great for unpropitious,
censorship/other-intrusion prone regimatic kind of online environment. )

( But I understand devs on a distro like Ubuntu may have a need to get
something more gui-like for less advanced newbies there... )

( BTQ, I had (luckily, read on), misreported a bug:

http://sourceforge.net/p/courier/mailman/courier-maildrop/?viewmonth=201508
and:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1027610.html

Luckily ;-) because our devs very soon afterwards updated Maildrop in
Gentoo's portage! )

Regards!

[Sam Varshavchik]

Don't understand what you mean.
E.g. (F)lagging a message may simply be desired, regardless of which folder.
Denoting that an answer has already been written, as e.g. in the
example above, cannot be done by moving mail to specific folder. It's
simply what the A flag is for.
And as for the last example, even when you move it to some folder, the
mail would still show up as unseen in the user's MUA, which is just
what's not desired in the above example.

If your maildrop recipe chooses to handle a particular message, in some
way – say send an autoreply, or set it aside for some special handling –
all that needs to happen is to deliver the message to the appropriate
folder; say a folder called "Replied", or "To Do".

And now, instead of having one flat Inbox, that you have to search for, to
find all of your flagged or replied messages, all of them are easily found
in a separate folder. They'll certainly be seen as unread in their dedicated
folder, but so what? If you want to find all of the autoreplied messages,
you open the "Replied" folder, and there they are. If you want to find all
of the flagged messages, you open the "To Do" folder. Mission accomplished.

Cheers,
Philippe

Post by Sam Varshavchik

Post by Sam Varshavchik

Have there been any news over the years on this front? I.e. the
problem on how to flag mail's as (S)een, (A)nswered, (D)eleted, etc. ?
That seems to pop up every now and then again here, there are probably
countless of blog entries where people complain about that issue :-(

Haven't seen that topic come up in a number of years, actually. I still
think that this is a solution in search of a problem.

There's for example, "[maildropl] Marking a message read when
delivering to a Maildir" right here on the list, from e.g. 2014
And as I've said, countless of blog posts, etc. which deal with that issue.
Also I don't know how you come to idea that this should be the search
of a problem.
Setting these flags seem to be one of the most basic featurs,
supported by sieve, or any MUA's internal filtersystem.
- e.g. automatically (f)lagging messages, based on e.g. From
- when maildrop is e.g. used to automatically reply to certain mails
(via passing them on to some scripts or so), may be desired to have
them marked (A)nswered
- when having high volume mailing lists subscribed, one may want to
mark most messages (S)een since one isn't interested in them, except
those which are e.g. directly To:ed to one self, or which include
certain keywords, etc. pp

Why would delivering messages to the appopriate folder, instead, be a
problem?
Simply delivering the messages to the appropriate folder seems to be a more
useful disposition.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Post by Sam Varshavchik
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Courier-maildrop mailing list
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/courier-maildrop

[Dimitri Maziuk]

Don't understand what you mean.
E.g. (F)lagging a message may simply be desired, regardless of which folder.
Denoting that an answer has already been written, as e.g. in the
example above, cannot be done by moving mail to specific folder. It's
simply what the A flag is for.
And as for the last example, even when you move it to some folder, the
mail would still show up as unseen in the user's MUA, which is just
what's not desired in the above example.

What I don't understand is, is there some RFC I'm unaware of that
defines some X-Seen and X-Answered and X-Whatever headers? Or this at
the level of "my MUApp du jour colours this kind of message yellow and I
want maildrop to do server-side magic so these messages come up this way
from the wire"? Presumably in yellow electrons?

[Sam Varshavchik]

Post by Dimitri Maziuk
What I don't understand is, is there some RFC I'm unaware of that
defines some X-Seen and X-Answered and X-Whatever headers? Or this at
the level of "my MUApp du jour colours this kind of message yellow and I
want maildrop to do server-side magic so these messages come up this way
from the wire"? Presumably in yellow electrons?

No there isn't. IMAP defines several standard status flags, for each message
in a mailbox, like "Seen" and "Replied". That's what mail clients use.

[Dimitri Maziuk]

Post by Sam Varshavchik

Post by Dimitri Maziuk
What I don't understand is, is there some RFC I'm unaware of that
defines some X-Seen and X-Answered and X-Whatever headers? Or this at
the level of "my MUApp du jour colours this kind of message yellow and I
want maildrop to do server-side magic so these messages come up this way
from the wire"? Presumably in yellow electrons?

No there isn't. IMAP defines several standard status flags, for each
message in a mailbox, like "Seen" and "Replied". That's what mail
clients use.

Ah, thanks. I was thinking of a wrong RFC then.

[Philippe Cerfon]

Hey.

I should perhaps notice that I withdraw that feature request - at
least from my side. :-)

While I still can't quite understand why a small patch isn't merged if
it helps many people, after more than 5 years of waiting for this (and
others have even requested it much earlier) one probably needs to
conclude that maildrop isn't going developed further in respect of
functionalities and people are apparently encouraged moving on to
Sieve, which I've done now.

Cheers and best wishes,
Philippe.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Dimitri Maziuk]

... basically every
server that speaks maildir supprts it as described here
http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html

A quick ls of my cur shows very few messages with :2,S yet they're all
"seen" in the thunderbird. So yeah, basically every server. Except the
dovecot shipped with rh 6.