[Dovecot] New Mailbox Format Plugin Help

[Sacha Bernstein]

On 12/8/07, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 10:11 -0500, Sacha Bernstein wrote:
> > I would like to develop a new mailbox format for a very specialized
> > application.  Can anyone point me in the appropriate direction to get
> > started writing a plugin?
> >
> > More detail for anyone interested:
> > I need to store mail in a format that's quickly accessible and
> > modifiable to an external process.  This is for a very low-volume mail
> > system (averaging less than 50 messages stored at any one time) that
> > needs very good indexing.  I need to create new mailboxes on the fly
> > and perform fast searches across all the mailboxes.  I intend to store
> > all the messages in an SQL database.  Any help getting started
> > interfacing with dovecot (other than reading through _all_ the source
> > code) would be greatly appreciated.
>
> v1.1 makes this a lot easier, so start with it instead of v1.0. You can
> probably get started with my existing SQL backend code:
> http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2007-November/026632.html
>
> The main idea is to implement APIs in lib-storage/mail-storage-private.h
> and lib-storage/mailbox-list-private.h. Most of these calls can be
> implemented by calling generic index_*() functions in
> lib-storage/index/.

Thanks, I'll get started with this.  I'm sure I'll have more questions
once I get further into it.  If anyone's interested (especially any
amateur radio operators that may be on this list), you can see what my
plans are for the SQL storage backend for dovecot at w2sjb.org.
Basically, the short version is a linux gateway to a radio-based email
system for use in emergencies.  Of course it has many other uses, but
that's what I'm going to be using it for :-)

Thanks,
Sacha