Shared Seen State
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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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