[Dovecot-news] v1.1.alpha1 released

[Timo Sirainen]

http://dovecot.org/releases/1.1/alpha/dovecot-1.1.alpha1.tar.gz
http://dovecot.org/releases/1.1/alpha/dovecot-1.1.alpha1.tar.gz.sig

This is the first alpha release of Dovecot v1.1. I hope that it
stabilizes into final release within a few months. There are a lot of
new features since v1.0. The most important ones are listed at the end
of this post.

This is the only v1.1.alpha announcement I send to dovecot-news list (or
to www.dovecot.org news). The next one probably will be v1.1.rc1.

I've been stress testing the code a lot and I've also been using it
myself for almost a year, so I think this release should actually be
quite stable and usable. But since I haven't tested everything, there
might be some crashes and misbehaving commands.

So this release should now have all the major features that I intend to
add to v1.1 (except for dbox rewrite, see below). Some smaller features
will still be added. The rest of the major features in my previous v1.1
list will go to v1.2.

While v1.1 is getting stabilized I'm beginning to rewrite dbox code. Its
code is isolated from the rest of Dovecot, so it can't destabilize
anything else. Hopefully it will be ready before v1.1 release, although
maybe still marked as experimental.

Some of the features might not be considered quite ready yet:

 - Mailbox list indexes improve STATUS performance a lot (maybe 7x) when
mailboxes haven't changed. Handling updates however is a lot slower than
I'd want (2x with one client, more with multiple), so you may want to
disable them with mailbox_list_index_disable=yes until the update
performance gets better.

 - THREAD code is completely rewritten with support for incremental
updates and index files. I tested it last year and it seemed OK, but I
didn't dare try it now so I wouldn't have to delay this alpha if it was
broken :) I'll do some more testing soon, but for now be careful with
using v1.1 with webmails.

 - SORT code also uses indexes now, but it's a lot simpler so it
probably works.

 - Squat indexes work and I'm using them myself, but they'll be
rewritten for v1.2 with a new faster format.

 - Although Dovecot now flushes NFS attribute/data caches when needed,
I'm not sure if it's done in all the necessary places.

 - I don't remember if I've tested expire plugin at all.

So, the largest changes I've added to NEWS file (which BTW won't contain
changes between alphas/betas/rcs, those will be only in my mailing list
posts):

	* After Dovecot v1.1 has modified index or dovecot-uidlist files,
	  they can't be opened anymore with Dovecot versions earlier than
	  v1.0.2.
	* Empty passwords in passdb doesn't allow user to log in with any
	  password anymore. To do that you'll also need to set nopassword
	  extra field.

	+ IMAP: Added support for UIDPLUS and LIST-EXTENDED extensions.
	+ IMAP SORT: Sort keys are indexed, which makes SORT commands faster.
	+ IMAP THREAD: Threads are indexed into a dovecot.index.thread file.
	  It can usually be updated incrementally, so this makes THREAD fast.
	+ Added Dovecot-specific X-REFERENCES2 threading algorithm.
	  It's similar to REFERENCES, but it doesn't do base subject merging
	  and it sorts the threads by their newest message.
	+ When saving messages, update cache file immediately with the data
	  that we expect client to fetch later. Maildir-only currently.
	+ NFS attribute and data caches are are flushed whenever needed.
	  See mail_nfs_storage and mail_nfs_index settings.
	+ Mailbox list indexes. Mailbox metadata is stored there, so STATUS
	  commands can return synchronized mailboxes' metadata simply by
	  reading a single mailbox list index file. Currently works only with
	  Maildir++ layout.
	+ Out of order command execution (SEARCH, FETCH, LIST), nonstandard
	  command cancellation (X-CANCEL <tag>)
	+ Expire plugin can be used to keep track of oldest messages in
	  specific mailboxes. A nightly run can then quickly expunge old
	  messages from the mailboxes that have them. The tracking is done
	  using lib-dict, so you can use either Berkeley DB or SQL database.
	+ Namespaces are supported everywhere now.
	+ Full text search indexing support with Lucene and Squat backends.
	+ OTP and S/KEY authentication mechanisms (by Andrey Panin).
	+ mbox and Maildir works with both Maildir++ and FS layouts. You can
	  change these by appending :LAYOUT=maildir++ or :LAYOUT=fs to
	  mail_location.
	+ LDAP: Support templates in pass_attrs and user_attrs
	+ Support for listening in multiple IPs/ports.
	+ Quota plugin rewrite: Support for multiple quota roots, warnings,
	  allow giving storage size in bytes or kilo/mega/giga/terabytes,
	  per-mailbox quota rules.

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