Shared Seen State

IMAP users maintain the information on whether or not a message is marked as read using so-called flags on the messages. The flag for marking a message as read or unread is \Seen.

Normally, each individual user has their own copy of which messages they did or did not yet read. This is not necessarily ideal, such as for a shared mailbox shared/info@example.org – a team of users may be picking messages from this mailbox as if it were a queue, and it would therefore be really useful if one team member could see whether another team member has already read the message.

Cyrus IMAP features the ability to share \Seen flags between all users with access to a mailbox to facilitate precisely this and other use-cases.

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