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x-label vs x-keywords



* On 2007.03.08, in <20070308085809.GB4530@xxxxxxxxxx>,
*       "Oswald Buddenhagen" <ossi@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 01:19:50AM -0600, David Champion wrote:
> > I guess as long as I'm knee-deep in pitching patches, xlabel_ext might
> > be nice to see as well.  This it the extension to x-label that allows
> > setting labels and sorting by label internally to mutt. 
> >
> hmm, this looks about the same as keywords support in c-client/pine.
> is one of those a (de-facto) standard?

I suppose both are de facto.  Since both appear to use X- headers, I
don't see that either is truly defined outside of their individual
implementations.  C-client's X-Keywords have probably been around longer
(I've never been a pine user, so I'm not sure), but X-Labels have been
in mutt for seven years, so there's perhaps a large base of messages
that use it already.  (This patch just adds an editor function and a
sort collator.)  C-client purports to be a general-purpose mail access
library, but in practice I'm not sure how many end-users are using
c-client without Pine or UW-IMAP.  But far more people use either pine
or UW than use mutt.

It looks like dovecot also supports X-Keywords.  X-Label is probably
supported only by mutt.

X-Label and X-Keywords map pretty closely -- labels are space-delimited,
keywords are comma-space-delimited.  We could adjust mutt to read both
and to write only one (or to write whichever was read).  However, I'm
not sure how IMAP servers (UW and dovecot) actually use the keywords.
Would having mutt handle this header interfere with that function?

-- 
 -D.    dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx        NSIT    University of Chicago