On Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:22:23 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org> wrote:
> First, it's important to understand that any friction here comes from
> Gmail exposing its tags as folders, (which in turn could be the lack of
> availability of a more tag-aware protocol than imap).

Even risking to become a bit thread-offtopic: IMAP itself supports tags
just fine and should be able to read/set/search all tags just fine (even
any user defined). My feeling is more that this is a lack of tag-using
IMAP clients to expose existing tag functionality. Thunderbird is doing
fine exposing up to 4 user-defined tags that are synced to the server,
but it's still not doing all it can.

I still believe that it would be possible to eg. sync all our notmuch
tags to the IMAP server, which would help enormously with syncing across
machines. I still have the long-term goal of offlineimap being able to sync
notmuch tags. (very long term, though)

As for Gmail and folders, I think it is an ugly kludge leading to all
kinds of awkward behavior (at least when treating Gmail as an IMAP
server). On the other hand it exposes nice tag behavior to clients that
wouldn't support it.

Sebastian