[notmuch] [PATCH] notmuch-new: Respect maildir flags when importing a new message

[Michal Sojka]

On Wed, 07 Apr 2010, Carl Worth wrote:
> On Mon,  1 Mar 2010 14:28:56 +0100, Sebastian Spaeth <Sebastian at SSpaeth.de> wrote:
> > When importing a new mail do check for maildir tags and assign
> > corresponding notmuch tags.
> 
> I think this is a useful thing to support, as obviously new users have
> *some* state that's interesting to import (which messages have been
> "seen" for example), and simply importing their entire email archive
> with both the "inbox" and "unread" tags is not helpful. So I'd like to
> figure out how to support this.

I'm solving this in my mailstore abstraction patches. I'll send the next
version in a while.

> > Do note that this will only add tags when importing a really new
> > message, and will not do anything when detecting a file rename
> > (although someone should really make it honor file renames as
> > well). Deleteing an existing message in another IMAP client will
> > therefore not trigger tagging (as it counts as a file rename).
> 
> But I think we really need to fix that if we're going to claim that
> notmuch "supports maildir flags" in any sense.
> 
> It's a fairly tricky issue though since we can have multiple files that
> have the same message ID, but then have different maildir flags. And
> it's the matter of arbitrary ordering which one of these files appears
> as "new" and which one appears as a "rename".

Yes, that's a problem. It is not currently solved in my pacthes, but I
have one solution in my mind. Let's discuss this with my patch.

> It's not obvious to me what we can do here unless we make some
> assumptions, (such as "mails always start without the seen flag, and
> once it appears it can't be removed" or so). But I'd love some input
> From someone who's thought harder about this than I have.

-Michal