[Dovecot] Persistence of UIDs

[Jean-Daniel Beaubien]

Hi everyone,

I have a question concerning UIDs. How persistant are they?

I am thinking about building some form of webmail specialized for some
specific business purpose and I am thinking of building a sort of cache in
a DB by storing the email addr, date, subject and UID for quick lookups and
search of correspondance.

I am doing this because I am having issue with multiple people searching
thru email folders that have 100k+ emails (which is another problem in
itself, searches don't seem to scale well when folder goes above 60k
emails).

So to come back to my question, can I store the UIDs and reuse those UIDs
later on to obtain the body of the email??? Or can the UIDs change on the
server and they will not be valid anymore?.

My setup is:
- dovecot 1.x (will migrate to 2.x soon)
- maildir
- everything stored on an intel 320 SSD (index and maildir folder)


Thanks,

-JD