[Dovecot-news] v2.1.alpha1 released

[Timo Sirainen]

http://dovecot.org/releases/2.1/alpha/dovecot-2.1.alpha1.tar.gz
http://dovecot.org/releases/2.1/alpha/dovecot-2.1.alpha1.tar.gz.sig

So it's time for the first alpha version of Dovecot v2.1. There are no
huge intrusive changes, so I expect v2.1.0 to be released this year
(maybe even in a few months?)

The biggest changes are related to full text search handling. I'll
probably still make some changes to it and its configuration. Also it
wouldn't be difficult to add more backends, does anyone want to add
Xapian support for Dovecot? :)

Mailbox list indexes are intended to improve performance of IMAP STATUS
command lookups, since they could be simply looked up from the index
without even opening the mailbox. TODO related to this: 1) optimize
virtual mailbox handling so that it doesn't need to actually open all of
the mailboxes' index files, it can simply look at the mailbox list index
for changes. 2) Implement IMAP NOTIFY extension using this.

Statistics tracking can be used to look at what's happening currently in
your system and also its history. You can look at what's happening in
command/session/user/domain/ip level. "doveadm stats top" gives a list
of currently running sessions and sorts them by whichever is using the
most disk io/cpu/whatever. "doveadm stats dump" followed by one of the
levels shows you a raw dump of everything stored in that level.

It would be nice if someone wrote a pretty Ajaxy HTML stats browser
where you could zoom in/out of levels. I'd also like to hear if anyone
has suggestions on how to improve what stats are gathered or how they
could be exported. (I've thought about SNMP, but I'm not entirely sure
how to export the data nicely using it.)

Finally here's the NEWS file:

	* Plugins now use UTF-8 mailbox names rather than mUTF-7:
	  acl, autocreate, expire, trash, virtual
	* auth_username_format default changed to %Lu. If you really want
	  case sensitive usernames, set it back to empty.
	* Solr full text search backend changed to use mailbox GUIDs instead of
	  mailbox names, requiring reindexing everything. solr_old backend can
	  be used with old indexes to avoid reindexing, but it doesn't support
	  some newer features.

	+ imapc (= IMAP client) storage allows using a remote IMAP server to
	  be used as storage. This allows using Dovecot as a smart (caching)
	  proxy or using dsync to do migration from remote IMAP server.
	+ Mailbox indexing via queuing indexer service (required for Lucene)
	+ Lucene full text search (FTS) backend rewritten with support for
	  different languages
	+ FTS finally supports "OR" search operation
	+ FTS supports indexing attachments via external programs
	+ IMAP FUZZY extension, supported by Lucene and Solr FTS backends
	+ Mailbox list indexes
	+ Statistics tracking via stats service. Exported via doveadm stats.
	+ Autocreate plugin creates/subscribes mailboxes physically only when
	  the mailbox is opened for the first time. Mailbox listing shows the
	  autocreated mailboxes even if they don't physically exist.
	+ Password and user databases now support default_fields and
	  override_fields settings to specify template defaults/overrides.
	- listescape plugin works perfectly now