Not to reply to myself, but this appears to be a Mozilla bug. The latest
Thunderbird nightly (win32 - 012804) seems to have fixed the issue.
Perhaps I should file the bug in Red Hat's Bugzilla under mozilla in
order to get the "Fix" backported.
Rick Johnson wrote:
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
