I recently switched from UW-IMAP to Dovecot IMAP and from mbox to Maildir directories on a server. On a different server, I've been using Dovecot with mbox for some time and recently converted it to Maildir as well. In both cases, I'm using Mozilla or Thunderbird as my client.
It appears that after switching from mbox where label flags are stored in headers to Maildir where the flags are stored at the tail of the filename, that message labels were "Broken". Message labels appear to be reverse associated with letters. Label 1 being f, Label 2 - d, 3 - c, 4 - b, and 5 - a.
How comes the problem. If I set one label and leave it, there's no problem. However if I change a label on a message, or attempt to remove it, it appears that dovecot isn't removing the previous label flag, but instead adding a new label. If I'm switching from 5 to 3, it appends c to a, and the client won't notice the difference. However, I can't switch back from 3 to 5, since the flags are stored alphabetically, and the previous flags aren't removed. Instead - the old label sticks. I can apply all labels, and all "characters" remain in the filename, however the "highest" in the alphabet is what gets displayed, and I end up with a trailer on the file of "abcdf".
Proper behavior would be to remove the previous label flag before applying a new one. This didn't appear to be a problem in the mbox version since the labels were stored in the headers under X-Label or something like that.
Interestingly, Evolution 1.4 is able to clear the labels, but only does so after you exit the client.
This happens under 0.99.10-6 (core 1) and 0.99.10.4-1 (devel).
Bugzilla time? I filed 114230 for Dovecot, but I'm not 100% sure if this
is a Dovecot or Mozilla issue. I'm leaning toward Dovecot not clearing
previous labels, since the mail client generally doesn't "care" what
backend format you're using and this wasn't a problem with mbox formatted msgs.
-Rick
-- Rick Johnson, RHCE #807302311706007 - rjohnson@xxxxxxxxxx Linux/Network Administrator - Medata, Inc. (from home) PGP Public Key: https://mail.medata.com/pgp/rjohnson.asc
