[Dovecot] Dovecot LDA munging INBOX access times?

[John Peacock]

Steven F Siirila wrote:
> We are running Dovecot 1.0.0 using mbox format (currently in the midst
> of conversion from UW IMAP).  We discovered today that the Dovecot LDA
> is accessing the user's INBOX at delivery time!

Umm, yeah, that's kind of the point.  mbox format is one big file with all of
the messages concatenated together.  So if a new message is delivered, then the
INBOX file has to be opened to append the new message.  This isn't a bug by any
stretch, but rather a different operational method than what you were expecting.

I'm guessing that UW IMAP doesn't retrieve new messages until the user asks for
them (e.g. out of /var/mail/something).  If you are using deliver, it actually,
you know, _delivers_ the message.  I think that there is a way to have the same
behavior as UW IMAP, but I don't know off the top of my head how to do that
(since we use maildir instead).  You may want to check the list archives first,
rather than claiming dovecot is doing something wrong...

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
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