Re: [Evolution] Issues with labels and flags

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Sat, 2015-12-05 at 02:24 -0500, Mark Foley wrote:
> But, I think it's clear: Evolution will show Maildir flags, but does not set
> same as Maildir flags.  Setting Evolution Lables does not set the flag field of
> the Maildir format email files. 

        Hi,
you are mixing different things together. The Maildir flags are just an
implementation detail of the Dovecot server. Evolution (neither
Thunderbird) knows anything about it, they both use IMAP protocol to
access the messages, which doesn't expose anything about the internal
format the respective server uses to store the messages in the folders.

Reading the earlier-provided
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir#IMAP_keywords
It says that the Dovecot server stores 26 well-known labels as Maildir
attributes *internally*, based on the list of these known labels stored
in the dovecot-keywords file. Yours dovecot-keywords may contain a line
like this:
   1 $label2
which maps to 'b' in the internal Dovecot Maildir file name flag list.

> I did upgrade to Ubuntu 15.10 and Evolution 3.16.5 -- which is how this test was
> run.

The update wasn't necessary in this case, IMAP labels/flags are treated
the same for a long time.

> So, is there a way to utilize the Maildir flag scheme in Evolution or is this
> simply not supported?

If you add the evolution-named labels into the Dovecot's
dovecot-keywords file, then they will be reflected in the Maildir file
names too, but it's not needed at all.

> From your log:

> * OK [PERMANENTFLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Deleted \Seen \Draft
> $label1 $label2 $label3 $label4 $Labelimportant $Labelpersonal
> $Labelwork \*)] Flags permitted.

The \* at the end of the list of the supported permanent flags means
that the server can store any flag names in the particular folder.
That's a good news, the flags can be stored on the server side, not
only on the client side. The 'flags' here means also 'labels' in the
evolution's context.

Later in the log is:

> * 250 FETCH (UID 2480 FLAGS (\Seen $label1 $label4 $Labelimportant))
> * 251 FETCH (UID 2481 FLAGS (\Seen $label2))

That is that the first message has set three labels, two from
Thunderbird, one from Evolution. The second message has set only one
label. All these are returned by the server, stored there as well.

Finally, the end your log shows:

> [imapx:A] I/O: 'A00041 UID STORE 2491 +FLAGS.SILENT ($Labelpersonal)'
> [imapx:A] I/O: '* 261 FETCH (UID 2491 MODSEQ (2489))
> A00041 OK Store completed.'

which means that the server successfully stored the $Labelpersonal
label on the message.

If I understand your claim properly, then you deal with two things
here:
a) labels set by the Evolution are not reflected in the internal
   Dovecot Maildir file names, the same as they are for Thunderbird.
   As I wrote above, do not care of this implementation detail.
b) labels set by the Evolution are not reflected on the Thunderbird
   side.
   This one is harder. First of all, your evolution doesn't store
   folder changes immediately, but only after you leave the folder,
   or some other refresh of the folder is initiated (simply said).
   That means that one option can be that the change wasn't saved
   yet, thus the Thunderbird didn't get the change when it was
   updating the same folder.
   The second option is more likely, it is that the Thunderbird changed
   the label naming for some reason (or the interoperability intention
   on the evolution side doesn't work properly), thus the Thunderbird
   doesn't understand the label names used by the Evolution. I believe
   it's it, because your log shows that the $label1, $label2, ... is
   used by the Thunderbird (unless you manually added some such in
   either of the clients, but I doubt it).

Thus to summarize, your version of Thunderbird doesn't understand of
the label names used by the Evolution, but the Evolution does
understand of the label names used by the Thunderbird.

By the way, what is your Thunderbird version, please?
        Bye,
        Milan