[Dovecot] Dovecot LDA munging INBOX access times?

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 22:51 -0500, Steven F Siirila wrote:
> > 2) If index files are fully synced, Dovecot writes X-UID: header. It
> > also updates nextuid field in X-IMAP: / X-IMAPbase: header of the first
> > message, which causes Dovecot to read() the file. The nextuid update
> > isn't really required, but I think some other bug shows up if it isn't
> > done.
> 
> Do these operations apply to Deliver or just IMAP/POP?

All.

> Not knowing enough about how the indexes work.... Question: Is it possible
> for Deliver to append a message w/o writing an X-UID header, leaving that
> operation to the IMAP/POP client code, and still maintain an updated index?

That's how messages are saved if index files aren't up-to-date. So the
X-UID: adding is just an optimization.

> If not, are there any options I can provide to Dovecot LDA to make it
> function without index file updating?

You could set:

protocol lda {
  mail_location = ...:INDEX=MEMORY
}

> What we have is a daemon called "mailattrd" on our mail servers which runs
> on a TCP port and simply does a stat() on a user's mailbox and returns the
> atime, mtime, ctime values of said mailbox.

You could do something like this:

do {
 st1 = stat(mbox)
 while (mbox.lock exists) wait;
 st2 = stat(mbox)
} while (st1.mtime != st2.mtime || st1.atime != st2.atime);

With some small lock timeout value.

> That "service" is used by a
> variety of our applications.  We were thinking of another possibility:
> changing Dovecot IMAP/POP to update the last access time (open in READ)
> of a specific file other than the user's INBOX.  However, we'd rather not
> maintain local modifications unless absolutely necessary.  

Mount with noatime and have Dovecot update the atime itself? I'm not
sure if the patch I sent is enough to update atime always.

> Any thoughts on alternatives which might be mailbox-format-independent?

There aren't really mailbox-independent ways to do this. With maildir
you'd probably stat() new/ and see if atime > ctime.
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