I want to write a Thunderbird Plugin, that allows me to add information (self-defined, or extending others e.g. tasks, dependencies etc.) and organize them. Is it possible to exchange and thereby synchronize such information automatically via IMAP? The goal is, to have the same information on other Thunderbird Clients with the same Plugin. I am not sure about the capabilities of IMAP and would be grateful for a good overview source.
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RFC 3501 is the reference of the capabilities of IMAP. Pretty much the only way to attach data to an existing message is via flags, and most servers will let you attach arbitrary flags to messages. You can also construct messages and APPEND them to various folders as long as they are MIME format. – Max Feb 15 '15 at 05:00
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thx, I will have a look into it! – grackkle Feb 15 '15 at 09:35
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The FLAGS are not meant for storing extensive data; the lenght of each flag is usually limited, and so is the total number of allowed flags per message and per mailbox. Another option for attaching semi-arbitrary metadata is the ANNOTATE extension from RFC 5257. Its adoption among various IMAP servers is far from universal, though.
Yet another option is sticking the metadata into another mailbox via specially crafted messages which only contain data that your client could parse, using a separate MIME type. That's rather ugly, though.
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