Synchronizing Thunderbird artefacts via IMAP?

Question

I want to write a Thunderbird Plugin, that allows me to add information (self-defined, or extending others eg tasks, dependencies etc.) and organize them. Is it possible to exchange and thereby synchronize such information automatically via IMAP? The goal is, to have the same information on other Thunderbird Clients with the same Plugin. I am not sure about the capabilities of IMAP and would be grateful for a good overview source.

Answer 1

The FLAGS are not meant for storing extensive data; the lenght of each flag is usually limited, and so is the total number of allowed flags per message and per mailbox. Another option for attaching semi-arbitrary metadata is the ANNOTATE extension from RFC 5257 . Its adoption among various IMAP servers is far from universal, though.

Yet another option is sticking the metadata into another mailbox via specially crafted messages which only contain data that your client could parse, using a separate MIME type. That's rather ugly, though.