[Dovecot] Indexing Performance Question (was tpop3d vs dovecot)

[Jakob Hirsch]

Quoting Timo Sirainen:

>> Oh. I would suggest a config switch (yes, yet another one) that tells
>> dovecot to do the same. Most clients don't care about it, anyway, and if
>> you tell your LDA to use crlf, dovecot would even do the right thing.
> Maybe.. I think plugin would be best though, since I don't really like
> adding options to intentionally break RFC.

It would not break RFC if the LDA adds crlf (e.g., Exim's builtin MDA
can do that).

> Anyway I don't think it should be that problematic if the cache file
> works properly. It probably doesn't even add all that much extra disk
> I/O since the client will just download the new mails anyway, so as long
> as they stay in kernel's buffer cache long enough there's no problem.
> Well, except for a bit of extra CPU usage.

That's all ok at the average site (and therefore most installations),
but it could give some benefit to large sites. But they should be able
to pay for such a feature, so we probably don't have to care about that. :)

> Oh and CVS HEAD deliver stores the message sizes directly into cache, so
> it won't be a problem at all with it. :)

Oh. I was already tempted to use dovecot-deliver, now even more :)
The only thing I really dislike: Why do deliver send it's own bounces?
As I understand a LDA, it tells the MTA by means of the exit code if the
delivery was successful or not, so the MTA can decide what to do (e.g.
after tempfail, try again later or freeze the message). And I don't even
know under which circumstances deliver bounces, as it appears to
sometimes use the tempfail exit code.

>> Hm, how does dovecot know that a message contains crlf, so it can use
>> sendfile instead of read/write? If you have some kind of simple
>> autodetection, like "read the first line, if it contains crlf, assume
>> all other lines also do", we already have some (non-optimized) form of
>> that.
>> I guess this also affects IMAP, right?
> There's no simple autodetection. There's a "message is binary safe" flag
> in cache file that gets set after the message has once been parsed and
> only CRLF-linefeeds were seen.

Oh. So dovecot-deliver could already do that? (maybe it already honours
the mail_save_crlf?)