[Dovecot] migrating from mbox to maildir

[Kyle Wheeler]

On Saturday, November 24 at 10:13 PM, quoth mouss:
>> If for some reason you are completely stuck with 0.99.x, then yes,
>> changing to Maildir format is pretty easy, and there are plenty of
>> conversion scripts out there in the world. Just ask Google. Keep in mind
>> if the real problem is some bug in Centos that prevents Dovecot from
>> using locks, then the Maildir conversion may not help much, because
>> Maildir (in Dovecot) uses locks as well.
>
>why lock?

To quote the Dovecot wiki 
(http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir):

     Although maildir was designed to be lockless, Dovecot locks the
     maildir while doing modifications to it or while looking for new
     messages in it. This is required because otherwise Dovecot might
     temporarily see mails incorrectly deleted, which would cause
     trouble. Basically the problem is that if one process modifies the
     maildir (eg. a rename() to change a message's flag), another
     process in the middle of listing files at the same time could skip
     a file. The skipping happens because readdir() system call doesn't
     guarantee that all the files are returned if the directory is
     modified between the calls to it. This problem exists with all the
     commonly used filesystems.

~Kyle
-- 
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love 
their mother.
                                               -- Fr. Theodpre Hesburgh
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