deltachat-core-rust Set \Answered flag on unencrypted messages when a reply is sent to them

Set \Answered flag on unencrypted messages when a reply is sent to them

Open gerryfrancis opened this issue 8 months ago • 3 comments

Expected behavior:

When replying to an email, the replied message gets the IMAP flag \Answered. Then, many clients have a specific icon in the UI to notify the user about it. This is very useful for tracking unreplied emails.

Actual behavior:

When replying to an email, no IMAP flag is set. Steps to reproduce the problem:

Reply to an email x.
List IMAP flags for x

Originally reported by @monperrus, see https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android/issues/3647 .

Mar 07 '25 08:03 gerryfrancis

On Fri, Mar 07, 2025 at 00:58 -0800, gerryfrancis wrote:

gerryfrancis created an issue (chatmail/core#6622)

Expected behavior:

When replying to an email, the replied message gets the IMAP flag \Answered. Then, many clients have a specific icon in the UI to notify the user about it. This is very useful for tracking unreplied emails.

These days we generally recommend to use dedicated chatmail addresses/accounts. Sharing an e-mail address with other clients is supported but not recommended and it is not bound to receive much energy for now.

Independently, it's also not clear when this "\Answered" flag should be set precisely. Not all replies are quote-replies in a chat messenger.

Lastly, chatmail is about pervasive end-to-end encryption with metadata protection and such a "cleartext" answered-flag would leak metadata.

Mar 07 '25 09:03 hpk42

We use \Seen flag in cleartext, but should not add more cleartext flags, especially if Delta Chat is not going to read it.

This \Answered flag is part of IMAP4rev1 so should be supported by all servers.

On encrypted mails it does not make sense to set it. Can be set on plaintext mails when they are explicitly quoted as a best effort, but it is definitely a feature request rather than a bug.