[Dovecot] Cooperating with dovecot in its Maildir

[Timo Sirainen]

On 29.1.2011, at 2.38, Rob Browning wrote:

> In this particular case, we're thinking of trying to allow notmuch to
> operate directly on the dovecot Maildir, and at the moment, the only
> modifications notmuch makes are to change maildir flags.  Would locking
> dovecot-uidlist.lock be sufficient, perhaps via liblockfile?

If you're only changing the standard maildir flags (not a..z = keywords) then you don't really need to lock anything. The uidlist locking could prevent a mail from being temporarily lost, but this happening is highly unlikely. http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir#Locking explains.

> Also, is there some reliable way to detect a dovecot Maildir?  For
> example, are any of the dovecot-* files guaranteed to exist all the
> time?

dovecot-uidlist always exists, but in some installations it's stored outside the maildir.