[MlMt] due dates?

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 22 Mar 2018, at 14:35, Eric Sharakan wrote:

> [due dates]

Just for the record, I consider this the same feature as when asked 
about postponing or snoozing messages. Some times [“tickler 
(file)”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tickler_file) is used (which I 
kind of like) and even “discard” (temporarily). There are probably 
more names. Some times the services followup.cc and Sanebox are also 
mentioned.

> But perhaps it could be accomplished via specially formatted IMAP 
> keywords that look acceptable to IMAP but can be parsed as dates by 
> MM?

The problem with IMAP keywords are that they are often limited in how 
many can exist on a given server (and some times they are not supported 
at all, but I don't worry to much about that as long as the feature 
still works locally).

Every time I'm asked about this feature I give it some more thought and 
I've got quite a lot of notes about it. It *can* be done using IMAP 
keywords, but it has to be smart about it. The following is how I 
*think* it could be implemented, but I haven't done anything yet and I 
make no promises. It's also very technical and basically just me 
thinking out loud. Maybe someone has something interesting to add :)

Apple uses a nice trick for colored flags where up to 8 different colors 
can be specified using 3 IMAP keywords. These flags are named 
`$MailFlagBit0`, `$MailFlagBit1` and `$MailFlagBit2` and the “trick” 
is to use them as the bits of a number.

The same could be done using `$TicklerBit0`-`$TicklerBitX`, but the 
problem is that much larger numbers are needed depending on the 
“base” of the number. This could be solved by having a separate 
value defining the base such as $TicklerMinutes, $TicklerHours, and 
$TicklerDays (this could be a bit pattern too, but I think that's 
overkill). I think this would reduce the need for IMAP keywords to a set 
of around 8 in most cases.

In addition to this, it might be worth considering to offer the user to 
also automatically move these emails into a separate IMAP folder, e.g., 
named “Tickler File” in each IMAP account. Each subfolder should be 
named after the original mailbox of the emails within the mailbox. When 
the time is up then MailMate can move the emails back based on the 
mailbox name. There would also be a need for doing this atomically if 
there are multiple active installations of MailMate. (I think I've 
figure out how to do this as well.)

Alternatively (or optionally), emails with tickler-values could just be 
hidden from display, but this would only work well in MailMate and not 
if using a tickler-unaware email client, e.g., on an iPhone.

Have a nice weekend :)

-- 
Benny
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freron.com/pipermail/mailmate/attachments/20180323/032a466a/attachment.html>