Feature: notes on emails?

[mattfbacon]

I'm not sure if this is in scope, but I think it would be useful to be able to attach personal, private notes to emails or threads. There are, for example, various extensions for Gmail that do this:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gmail-notizen-notizen-zu/bbpgdlmdmlalbacneejkinpnpngnnghj
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gmail-notes-by-cloudhq/elogffplkfhmdkmkiganmbghjhfdfpfm
(have not used any of them)

But it's also another not really basic-email-compatible feature (unless we do it in a way similar to a saved draft, could be interesting). Thoughts?

[mjl-]

The IMAP ANNOTATE extension seems to fit the bill for a standardized way to access per-message metadata. See https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5257.html.

It allows storing metadata for a message. Not specifically for a thread, but perhaps mail clients should be smart about adding thread-annotations to the top-level message of a thread. One of the standard metadata fields is just "comment", which may fit the purpose. The webmail client could provide access to the comment (show/set it).

Incidentally, I committed support for the METADATA extension yesterday. It is quite similar, but for metadata per mailbox or globally for the server. I didn't add any webmail integration for that though, but it could be implemented similarly to the per-message metadata.

It would be interesting to know if (and how) other mail clients implement annotations. Perhaps you (or someone else) could do a quick search in docs of popular mail clients?

[mattfbacon]

Not specifically for a thread, but perhaps mail clients should be smart about adding thread-annotations to the top-level message of a thread.

I thought this as well, under the hood it would be stored on a specific message and propagated to the entire thread. That way you could have different notes for two forks of the thread, and you would see both on the common messages.

It would be interesting to know if (and how) other mail clients implement annotations. Perhaps you (or someone else) could do a quick search in docs of popular mail clients?

Sure. Most servers don't support it, for example dovecot does not. Stalwart also does not. Roundcube, the client I used before mox, does have support. FairEmail, my Android client, does not. Chicken and egg I would say.