Roundcubemail: Tags for messages

[rcubetrac]

_Reported by moish on 29 Mar 2009 15:47 UTC as Trac ticket #1485799_

I wish we had a tagging system - yes very much like Gmail.
Current "Flagged/Unflagged" is not sufficient.
Thunderbirds' solution isn't sufficient either but saving searches
and favorites is getting closer.

_Keywords: tag tagging gmail_
_Migrated-From: http://trac.roundcube.net/ticket/1485799_

[rcubetrac]

_Comment by jjay06 on 5 May 2011 15:33 UTC_

Hello,
I would like to push up the feature request by this comment. I'm also a gmail user, who would like to quit for round cube. But, the show stopper I see for my own usage is this tag feature. Once you use it, it's very difficult to forget it.

The main added values are :

• "folder virtualization"
• multiple tags for a same mail.
• Filetring : One mail can be ,Urgent,administratif while an other can be Urgent and personnal. This is very useful to have these tags as they can be use to filter mails.

[rcubetrac]

_Comment by jsnlry on 7 Feb 2014 12:26 UTC_

I also want to vote for this feature!

[rcubetrac]

_Comment by asp on 31 Aug 2014 22:22 UTC_

It appears that this can be done using IMAP keywords.

There is an ongoing feature request for K9 Mail for this functionality as well.
https://code.google.com/p/k9mail/issues/detail?id=4101

[helt]

https://plugins.roundcube.net/packages/weird-birds/thunderbird_labels is a first step towards this (technically)

[Post79]

It would be nice to see this feature in the near future. I have been using MailTags on OSX which puts tags in the header. In combination with smart/virtual folders would make RC a great webclient for managing lots of emails.

Advanced example also using a date:
This header additions would give the tag "@Followup" with a tickle date.

X-Mailtags-Timestamp: 2017-03-10 17:05:08 +0100
X-Mailtags: {"mailTagsKeyWords":["@Followup"]}

Making a smart Followup folder would help me focus just on the tagged messages in which the tickledate has passed.

[MarHai]

+1

[alecpl]

There's also https://git.kolab.org/diffusion/RPK/browse/master/plugins/kolab_tags/ plugin. It uses Kolab storage format, so it would need to be extended with some other storage method, but it provides UI and some useful code for tagging functionality.
BTW, imho imap keywords as well as mail headers have pros and cons and I'm not sure these storage methods should be used.

[daniele-athome]

BTW, imho imap keywords as well as mail headers have pros and cons and I'm not sure these storage methods should be used.

I believe tags should be stored where the mail is stored, that is in the IMAP server, so they can be read by every client. Are there any other ways, beside IMAP keywords and mail headers, to guarantee that as far as you know?

[alecpl]

The 3rd option is the Kolab way, i.e. keeping the tags database in a special IMAP folder (normally hidden in Kolab clients). 4th will be SQL databse.

[daniele-athome]

https://plugins.roundcube.net/packages/weird-birds/thunderbird_labels is a first step towards this (technically)

I had to fork that plugin because it tied Roundcube to Thunderbird default labels (especially for the colors, which are not stored on the server AFAIK). We should find a way to use labels in a more generic way. If it can help, I've also wrote a small Dovecot plugin - very small and it needs to evolve - to help integrate with clients not supporting IMAP keywords.

[xorg]

+1 I would also like a label system and a way to sort and search by label.

[azmeuk]

I had to fork that plugin because it tied Roundcube to Thunderbird default labels (especially for the colors, which are not stored on the server AFAIK). We should find a way to use labels in a more generic way. If it can help, I've also wrote a small Dovecot plugin - very small and it needs to evolve - to help integrate with clients not supporting IMAP keywords.

Did you consider reporting this behavior to the author of the upstream plugin? There has been some activity there lately, maybe this could avoid you maintaining each patch?

[daniele-athome]

I didn't because I thought that plugin purpose is to address Thunderbird labels specifically. But it's worth a shot I guess.

[TonyGravagno]

I believe the IMAP store should contain all metadata so that it's accessible to other clients, whether Thunderbird, K9, FairMail, or others on specific platforms. That seems to imply using headers. If Roundcube core does not support labels / tags, can we rally behind a plugin that does it well? As I look at the landscape I'm not sure which plugin to consider. The plugin by @daniele-athome is outdated. The current and still-supported "standard" seems to be by @mike-kfed : https://github.com/mike-kfed/roundcube-thunderbird_labels. It would help to get the warm fuzzies about exactly how that works, what it does and doesn't do, and some notes about why it is and is not a good solution to this long-term challenge.

[mike-kfed]

one major problem is that roundcube removes e.g. $ from the imap labels (I assume as an effort to avoid some PHP level code injections?), and uppercases them making it impossible to write them back to IMAP using existing tags (plus weird side effects for non-ascii based languages since they are utf-7 encoded everything is uppercase except e.g. umlauts). When looking to make my plugin use any labels and not just the default 5 of thunderbird(*), those are the biggest roadblocks. Handing out the real IMAP data would make it feasible to have dynamic tag support in my or any other plugin.

(*) this is already a hack as they are are called $Label1 to $Label5 in imap life, but that is not what the plugin gets to see, if you were to use Label1 in your mail client plus $Label1 of TB those separately named tags would both appear as LABEL1 in roundcube to a plugin. Since labels/tags are actually case sensitive you can imagine what happens to freely named ones after your plugin only sees them uppercased and without special characters writing them back to the server...

[andrewgioia]

+1 for this feature as well, it's the only missing thing for my workflow and keeping me from switching