Different 'Sent' Mailboxes for Different Devices / Clients

Question asked by Michael Muller - 12/10/2019 at 8:58 AM

Answered

Just wondering out loud about how people deal with the three or more different "Out" mailboxes each email client program seems to prefer.

Looks like SM Webmail likes "Sent Items"; Thunderbird likes just "Sent"; iPhones and iPads seem to like "Sent Messages"; and, correct me if I'm wrong, but Outlook likes either "Sent" or "Sent Items" and/or "Outbox."

Personally, I use three clients nearly simultaneously: Thunderbird (mostly), iPhone/iPad, SM Webmail, and as a result I have three different sent boxes.

Just curious if the IMAP protocol has some sort of infomatic way of communicating what the default Sent mailbox is named so when clients are setting up accounts, those folders are adopted.

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Montague WebWorks
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Employee Replied

12/10/2019 at 9:41 AM

Employee Post

Michael,

I don't believe IMAP has a way of communicating that specifically. However, most email clients will allow you to manually specify the Sent mailbox to use.

Sébastien Riccio Replied

12/10/2019 at 11:40 AM

There is an IMAP protocol extension for this and probably most clients use it to auto assign "special folders" when you setup an account.

At least it works with IMAP servers like dovecot where you can configure this.

As par RFC:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6154

And dovecot imap server configuration:

https://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxSettings

Doesn't SmarterMail IMAP implementation support this extension ?

Then it's up to the different mail clients to use or not the information returned by the server.

Sébastien Riccio System & Network Admin https://swisscenter.com

Matt Petty Replied

12/10/2019 at 12:16 PM

Employee Post Marked As Answer

We do, we also flag each folder when communicating the folder list. These folders were likely created by Gmail for Android/IOS which I've noticed ignores these flags and creates and uses its own set of folders, regardless of what we tell it.

Matt Petty Senior Software Developer SmarterTools Inc. www.smartertools.com

Michael Muller Replied

12/10/2019 at 12:44 PM

Interesting. Well, hopefully some day everyone will get together and agree to pay attention to what the mail servers are saying. This would include a standard for autconfig. I mean, honestly, as if our job wasn't hard enough.

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