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Color groups, Tags, and IMAP flags. How do they all interact?, Trying to understand the tagging system!!!
 
I've been fooling around with the tags and color groups in TheBat! What I see is that when I set a color group on a message, it sets an IMAP flag on that message in the obfuscated form of CG followed by an 8-digit hex number (example: CGE24785EB). Another copy of TheBat! running on a different machine can correctly interpret those IMAP flags and display the proper color group, but other email clients display the CGxxxxxxxx flag string.

Defining a new Color Group includes specifying a "Unique ID" which in the built-in cases are all small integers. It appears that non-integer ID names also work, though I thought I saw some funny behavior from that. Apparently the "Unique ID" defines the CGxxxxxxxx string in some non-obvious way.

Setting a tag on a message is stored locally but does not appear to be saved into the IMAP server, so the tags will not propagate to a different machine. That's too bad, because I can put multiple tags on a message but only one color group.

Apparently I can apply a color group to a folder or to an account, but it isn't clear what that does. Does it just make a cosmetic change to the folder display?

I'd really like to see some better documentation on this stuff. I'd particularly like to be able to share tags between machines and even with other email client software such as Mozilla Thunderbird or Opera Mail, but without having to use flag strings like CG7C231048.
 
I use POP3 so my results are different.

My color  ID is whatever I want to name it. Most of mine are the same as the color ID name or an version of it. In one case I have "Yellow" but don't use the color RGB numbers at all.

Since color groups are not permanent I use for color coding incoming mail or making mail for follow-up. Example I have a "Follow-up" color of Yellow that I use for reminding me to follow but not necessarily reply such as shipping notices of orders.  To quickly see them I have a message tab that filters on that color ID.

Tags are more permanent.  An example is I have a "Receipts" tag and can filter for those in message tabs.  I can't say how IMAP handles them but I do know that if I send an email to myself using a different email than the one I used to send with a tag assigned the tag shows on the received email. Example, I send from a gmail account to an outlook account and the download that email has the tag in place. I assume other email programs won't display the tag. I used to think tags are embedded in the message header but I can't confirm that. I just checked 3 emails I have tagged and only one has the tag embedded. The other two don't so maybe TB stores some in a database based on sender's email program? My example of gmail to outlook does have the tag embedded in the header under X-Message-Tags:.

Maybe someone with more knowledge of the standards on tags can clarify.
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