From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
To: Rainer M Krug <R.M.Krug@gmail.com>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: gmail label support patch available for oflineimap
In-Reply-To: <k8vn08$62g$2@ger.gmane.org>
References: <k8vn08$62g$2@ger.gmane.org>
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Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:44:23 -0400
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Rainer M Krug <R.M.Krug@gmail.com> writes:

> there is a patch available for synching gmail labels to X-Keywords in
> the message (full thread see
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.offlineimap.general/5943 ).
>
> Would notmuch be able to translate these X-Keywords into tags, so that
> one could use notmuch and it's tags as gmail uses the labels?

Reading tags from X-Keywords would be a Simple Matter of Programming
(TM), although you'd have to be sure you could trust that header as
injected by you and not some evil adversary.  There would also be some
questions about forwarding such messages (e.g. should the X-Labels be
stripped when forwarding).  

I expect there would be some resistance to writing X-Labels back to
message files, since having read-only message files is more or less a
design goal. 

In summary, it could probably be done, but I'm not sure it would be a
better approach than interfacing directly with gmail via their extended
IMAP interface.  Personally, if I was interested in solving this
problem, I'd be more interested in a solution that didn't wed me to
offline imap, if the two solutions were in the same rough ballpark of
effort. The direct method would also not modify mail messages. Still,
others might feel differently.

The notion of storing labels in messages has been mooted before as a
general synching solution. That might make it more interesting to me.

d