dovecot - Aug 2014 - Is atomic MOVING of messages between IMAP folders possible?

I would like to use a shared IMAP account, with multiple users accessing it
simultaneously.  The users would take ownership of messages by first
attempting to MOVE the messages from the Inbox,  into their private IMAP
folder, still within the same account. Now, since there will be multiple
users competing for the same messages, I naturally want only ONE of the
simultaneous moves to be successful at a time.

So far, this isn't working. If I do the move from two clients,
simultaneously, the messages can go to *both *destination folders -
duplicates can result.

Is it possible to configure Dovecot and/or an IMAP client to behave the way
I want it to? If the answer to this is YES, then I'll offer my config
details. If the answer is NO, the next question is - do any email systems
at all behave the way I want? (I tried a hosted Exchange/OWA service - it
has the same problem)

Thanks & regards,
Greg.

On 04 Aug 2014, at 10:44, Greg Sullivan <greg.sullivan at sullivang.net>
wrote:
> I would like to use a shared IMAP account, with multiple users accessing it
> simultaneously.  The users would take ownership of messages by first
> attempting to MOVE the messages from the Inbox,  into their private IMAP
> folder, still within the same account. Now, since there will be multiple
> users competing for the same messages, I naturally want only ONE of the
> simultaneous moves to be successful at a time.
> 
> So far, this isn't working. If I do the move from two clients,
> simultaneously, the messages can go to *both *destination folders -
> duplicates can result.
> 
> Is it possible to configure Dovecot and/or an IMAP client to behave the way
> I want it to? If the answer to this is YES, then I'll offer my config
> details. If the answer is NO, the next question is - do any email systems
> at all behave the way I want? (I tried a hosted Exchange/OWA service - it
> has the same problem)
Dovecot doesn't even attempt to do atomic MOVEs. I don't think any
server will. If you can change the client code, you could use CONDSTORE instead,
which does give atomic STOREs.