Synchronizing Thunderbird's Replied Flag
My main email client is Thunderbird, but I also use BlackBerry's and Apple's
clients,
all through the same IMAP account.
Disconcertingly, email messages to which I have
replied through the other clients don't show up in Thunderbird with the
"replied" (
) icon.
This means that when I browse my email using Thunderbird,
I waste time trying to remember whether I have responded
to a particular message.
Here is how I solved the problem.
The replied icon appears when the Thunderbird-specific message header
X-Mozilla-Status contains the MSG_FLAG_REPLIED
flag set.
(Flags are
well documented in the client's source code).
To set it in messages I have replied to,
the script goes through the local Sent message folder
(I store them there after fetching them from the IMAP Sent folder)
and looks at the In-Reply-To header.
It then scans my Pending messages folder,
and sets the replied flag for all messages whose Message-ID
matches one of those encountered in the sent messages.
In common with an email analytics script
I wrote a few months ago, I used
Mark Overmeer's
excellent
Mail-Box
email processing Perl package to read and write the message folders.
Here is the script; I hope you'll find it useful!
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Find messages that are replies to others and set Thunderbird's Replied flag
# D. Spinellis, October 2010
#
use strict;
use Mail::Box::Mbox;
my %replied;
if ($#ARGV != 1) {
print STDERR "usage: $0 sent-filder pending-folder\n";
exit 1;
}
read_sent($ARGV[0]);
set_replied($ARGV[1]);
unlink("$ARGV[1].msf");
# Find all messages that have been replied
sub read_sent {
my ($folder) = @_;
print STDERR "Processing folder $folder\n";
my $folder = Mail::Box::Mbox->new(folder => $folder, lock_type => 'NONE');
foreach my $m ($folder->messages) {
my $irt = $m->head->get('In-Reply-To');
$replied{$irt} = 1 if (defined($irt));
}
$folder->DESTROY();
}
# Set the Thunderbird replied bit in messages that were replied
sub set_replied {
my ($folder) = @_;
my $MSG_FLAG_REPLIED = 0x0002;
print STDERR "Processing folder $folder\n";
my $folder = Mail::Box::Mbox->new(folder => $folder,
extract => 'LAZY',
access => 'rw',
write_policy => 'INPLACE', # REPLACE
lock_type => 'NONE');
foreach my $m ($folder->messages) {
my $status = hex(my $oh = $m->head->get('X-Mozilla-Status'));
next if ($status & $MSG_FLAG_REPLIED);
my $id = $m->head->get('Message-ID');
if ($replied{$id}) {
my $newval = sprintf("%04x", $status | $MSG_FLAG_REPLIED);
print "$oh -> $newval\n";
$m->head->set('X-Mozilla-Status', $newval);
}
}
$folder->close() or die "Couldn't write $folder: $!\n";
}
