Which IMAP flags are reliably supported across most mail servers?

Posted by Ben Butler-Cole on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Ben Butler-Cole
Published on 2010-02-23T13:49:07Z Indexed on 2010/04/03 17:03 UTC
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imap

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emailserver

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imap-flags

I am writing an application which reacts to emails sent to a mailbox. It retrieves the emails via IMAP. It will be deployed to a number of systems where I do not control the mail server configuration.

I would like to use IMAP flags to indicate which messages have been handled. Are the system flags sufficiently widely supported that I can reasonably depend on them in my application? Are user-defined flags sufficiently widely supported?

(If the answer is "ha ha, not a chance", then I shall use folders instead.)

Thanks

-Ben

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