Labelling, Tagging or Flagging

[LevitatingBusinessMan]

Currently there are 2 "ways" to label messages in the webmail.

You can use sieve to move them into a separate folder.

Or you can use the message_highlight feature which doesn't use sieve but rather uses simplified filtering rules on client side to give messages a color.

Most modern mail clients use something like vfolders or labels or tags for emails. The easiest way to do this is by assigning IMAP flags to emails. Sieve can do this via rfc5232 and this is already supported in Roundcube.

These are the same flags like Read, Unread, Flagged etc. However you can assign custom ones and many mail clients will display them like a label.

I found two decent plugins that add some labels/tags/flags support to roundcube:

• https://github.com/binsentsu/message_label
• https://github.com/mike-kfed/roundcube-thunderbird_labels

Thunderbird supports 5 default tags. The latter plugin displays and manages these in roundcube. These flags are encoded as $Label1 to $Label5.

Having labels in Roundcube has been a much requested feature for the past 15 years. There is an upstream issue that has hindered some development https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/issues/4986. This thread is worth a read. A major hurdle that mike-kfed mentioned is that roundcube mangles the flags, removing special characters and upcasing them. This is one of the reasons roundcube-thunderbird_labels is not extended with more features.

You can view the tag settings for ThunderBird in the advanced preferences, here you can see that I have the 5 default tags + two tags foss and university. I automate these through sieve.

I think the best way to add some of this functionality to roundcube is to add roundcube-thunderbird_labels (with the badges style). It is actively developed and used. I also think this is the best groundwork to expand upon if we want to add custom labels.

The message_label provides a way to create and manage custom labels but it's not actively maintained.

[ScottPeterJohnson]

I'll test it out. It is a shame Roundcube doesn't fully support custom flags given that Purelymail does, but five does sound better than zero for the UI.