Fastmail and Viv M3 Mail

[whypester]

I am wondering what I'm doing wrong here.

New fastmail account.
Set to Labels instead of Folders.

When I create a label in VIV M3 Mail, it does not appear on the Fastmail server, and when I move an email to the Fastmail ARCHIVE Folder, it no longer appears under the label.

I can establish a "Folder" and move an email to it, and both M3's internal label and the email appear on the server under the "Folder" aka Label.

I'm curious about what I'm doing wrong here. Is it true that Viv's Labels are only visible within VIV M3, and that Fastmail's IMAP server cannot access them?

I'm *kind of* new to M3. I tried it before (probably a year or two ago) and thought it needed more improvement, so I figured, it's been a LONGGGGG time since I've tried M3, let me try it again.

Thanks!

[JeremyNicoll]

WHY is the exact text of your question already on the Vivaldi forum dated two years ago (17 JUN 2024)? See:

https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/9862...=1781166219953

YOU ALREADY discussed this there & received good advice - including "Please ask Fastmail to explain why they chose to do this..."



Perhaps you don't realise - THIS is a users forum - NOT an FM support system. Even if this was an official place for support ... not providing a link to the discussion on the Vivaldi forum is peculiar.

It looks to me as if two years ago you should have raised a support ticket with Fastmail. Did you?

[hadaso]

I don't think "label" is an IMAP concept. As far as I understand Fastmail's labels are IMAP folders, and when accessing Fastmail with an IMAP client a user should see them as folders in the IMAP client. From the discussion in that thread in the Vivaldi forum I understand that the M3 client has a concept of "labels" and they are implemented using IMAP flags. This is completely different from Fastmail's implementation, and there is no reason to expect Fastmail's client to show labels created on the Vivaldi mail client, since Fastmail's client has no means of displaying IMAP flags applied to a message (one should be able to search for messages with a particular IMAP flag in the Fastmail webmail client, but to see the messages that have a particular label in the Vivaldi mail client one would need to know the exact IMAP flag representing that label.


The same issue exists with incompatibilities between Gmail's and Vivaldi's labels.

Personally I think the "right" way to implement labels in IMAP should have been using IMAP flags, and not replacing folders with labels, so users would be able to use both folders and labels, but Fastmail used the folders=labels paradigm, like Gmail did before them.

[pjroutledge]

Originally Posted by hadaso

Personally I think the "right" way to implement labels in IMAP should have been using IMAP flags, and not replacing folders with labels, so users would be able to use both folders and labels, but Fastmail used the folders=labels paradigm, like Gmail did before them.

That's interesting.

Do you know how multiple labels against individual messages are implemented in the folders=labels paradigm?

For example, if I associate labels 'A' and 'B' with one particular email, would Fastmail duplicate the message in two folders, 'A' and 'B' to simulate labels?

Just trying to get my head around the actual implementation and what impact that might have on conversations, notes, replies, etc.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by pjroutledge

Do you know how multiple labels against individual messages are implemented in the folders=labels paradigm?

For example, if I associate labels 'A' and 'B' with one particular email, would Fastmail duplicate the message in two folders, 'A' and 'B' to simulate labels?

I don't really know how it is implemented internally.
What I do know is that you can file a message in multiple folders. When a message is filed in more than one folder, an action performed on it in one folder affects the "copies" in the other folders (that are not really copies: they are all the same single message): if you delete an attachment from from one copy of a message, that attachment is removed from all the copies in all other folders. If you have a message in both folders A and B, and you drag the message from folder B to folder C, the "copy" in folder A will be gone, that is you would only have one copy in folder C.
It wasn't always this way. In the distant past when you copied a message from folder A to folder B you would have two separate copies, and what you did with one copy did not affect the other copy. Often when I received a message discussion two different topics, I would file copies in two folders (one per topic) and remove from each copy the attachments that are unrelated to the topic of that folder. This used to work until one day several years ago I found out that the attachment I stripped from one copy was simultaneously removed from the other "copy"..
You make a "copy" of a message by either dragging the message to another folder holding the "alt" key when dropping the message, or by dragging the extra folder onto the message. So folders in Fastmail's webmail client are actually "labels" and not "real folders" (however I think the same applies to folders in all major file systems: you can have one file in multiple folders in Windows or Linux and when you change the contents of the file in one folder it is changed in all of them).

[pjroutledge]

Wow. Thanks hadaso.

That makes it sound more like an implementation of labels that simulate folders (rather that folders that simulate labels).