Jutta Degener <jutta(_at_)sendmail(_dot_)com> writes:
(Alexey described that he doesn't want to have to
keep track of what flags exist, but I still haven't
seen what his users actually _do_ with all those
flags that they don't want to keep track of.)
Here is what some users do:
For each employee, there is a set of flags jim-important, jon-todo,
ann-stalled, etc, and another set of flags qa-important, qa-stalled,
hr-important etc for each department (and another set for projects,
etc). The mail clients are configured to make these articles visible
easier, depending on the customizations by the user. A message can
have any number or combination of flags, e.g., jon-todo, ann-stalled,
and qa-important, which all can be set individually.
In this scenario, it isn't (in general) unreasonable to want to be
able to extract a string from the message and set a flag corresponding
to the flag. (I haven't followed the imapflags/variables thread
closely, so I don't know if this is a reasonable goal there.)