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SpecialUse

Aki Tuomi edited this page Oct 8, 2024 · 1 revision

Mailboxes and SPECIAL-USE

Traditionally IMAP clients have automatically created Sent, Spam, etc. mailboxes themselves and used various different names for them. This of course makes interoperability between clients difficult. So SPECIAL-USE IMAP extension was developed to allow clients to determine which mailboxes should be used for which purposes.

This page could be helpful for IMAP server admins to figure out how all of this works in different IMAP clients. The columns mean:

  • SPECIAL-USE: Does the client support SPECIAL-USE, and when?

    • no: Not supported

    • once: When account is created. If the server adds/changes SPECIAL-USE configuration it's not picked up unless the account is recreated.

    • always: The client always (or periodically) checks for changes in the server's SPECIAL-USE configuration and either changes its own configuration or asks user what to do.

  • CREATE-SPECIAL-USE: Does the client support CREATE-SPECIAL-USE?

  • Lang: ISO language code, e.g. "en", "de", "it".

  • Configurable: Are the mailbox names configurable by user?

  • \Fields: Name of the mailboxes that the client creates when it doesn't use the server's SPECIAL-USE names.

    • \All and \Flagged not included, because I don't think any IMAP clients actually have them?

Please update the table with any clients you know of!

IMAP client SPECIAL-USE CREATE-SPECIAL-USE Lang Configurable \Sent \Trash \Drafts \Junk \Archive
Thunderbird always? ? en yes Sent Trash Drafts Junk Archives
Outlook 2013 once/always? (XLIST-only) ? en yes? Sent Items ? Drafts ? ?
Outlook 2010 ? ? en partially (Junk is fixed) Sent Items Trash Drafts Junk E-mail ?
iOS 5.0 always ? en yes Sent Messages Deleted Messages Drafts Junk Archive
Mail.app (OSX 10.9) once/always? ? en yes Sent Messages Deleted Messages Drafts Junk -
Roundcube once yes en yes Sent Trash Drafts Junk Archive
KMail ? ? en yes Sent Trash Drafts Spam ?
K-9 Mail once no en yes Sent Trash Drafts Spam Archive
Open-Xchange IMAP Client always ? en yes ? ? ? ? ?
IMP/horde ? yes all yes Sent Trash Drafts Spam -
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