[Dovecot] Gmail like labels, three years later

[Timo Sirainen]

On 27.3.2013, at 5.15, Pablo Vieira <pablo at vieira.es> wrote:

> On this post http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2011-June/059605.html I
> was asking about the possibility of using arbitrary labels on messages,
> much like Gmail does. On following replies, I was told about  few tricks
> that might be used, that the IMAP protocol was being considering UTF-8
> labels and ways to integrate them into the current system, etc., etc., etc.
> That sounds nice and all.
> 
> I'm chiming in three years later only to know if things have changed, both
> at Dovecot and at the IMAP protocol. Are we closer to have proper labels on
> IMAP? Labels that help sorting messages in virtual folders where a message
> can belong in several of them?

My latest idea: Keep using the rather dummy simple IMAP keywords. Use IMAP METADATA to create a mapping between keyword <-> human readable name. Dovecot is getting close to having native METADATA support. Such IMAP standard would still need to be designed though. Anyone up for writing an RFC? :)