[Dovecot] Shared Squat index for public mailboxes

[Frerich Raabe]

Am 10.10.2012 09:49, schrieb Robert Schetterer:
> Am 10.10.2012 09:29, schrieb Frerich Raabe:
>> I'm running Dovecot 1.2.17 for serving mail via IMAP as well as for
>> providing access to a mailing list archive. The archive is implemented
>> as a public read-only mailbox with per-user index files (i.e. the \Seen
>> flags are per-user).
>
> i guess better upgrade to 2.1.x
> first

Given that Dovecot 1.2.17 works fine for me, I actually didn't see the 
need to upgrade yet.

>> I recently enbled the Squat plugin to accelerate searches in the message
>> bodies and noticed that every user (I'm using a virtual user setup) gets
>> his own dovecot.index.search and dovecot.index.search.uids copies.
>>
>> Is it possible to share those files among all users of the system? The
>> squat plugin appears to store the search indices among the other index
>> files (as explained on http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS/Squat) no
>> matter what; I considered storing a central copy of the index files
>> somewhere and then creating symlinks for all users. It should be ok as
>> far as file-permissions go since all mail is owned by a single vmail
>> system user, but I wonder whether the indices are really the same (I
>> noticed their md5 checksums differ) and whether there may be file
>> locking issues in case two users search message bodies simultaneously.
>>
>> Can anybody shed some light?
>>
>
> after upgrade
> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/FTS/Lucene
> may be better choice

Why?

> this info might help
>
> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailLocation
>
> ---snip
> Index files
>
> Index files are by default stored under the same directory as mails.
> With maildir they are stored in the actual maildirs, with mbox they are
> stored under .imap/ directory. You may want to change the index file
> location if you're using NFS or if you're setting up shared mailboxes.
>
> You can change the index file location by adding :INDEX=<path> to
> mail_location. For example:
>
> mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:INDEX=/var/indexes/%u
> --snip

I already use this; as I mentioned, the index files of the public 
readonly mailbox is stored per-user so that each user has his own set of 
\Seen flags. Here's my public namespace:

namespace public {
   separator = /
   prefix = Lists/
   location = 
maildir:/home/vmail/lists/Maildir:CONTROL=~/Maildir/lists:INDEX=~/Maildir/lists
   subscriptions = no
}

Alas, this means that *all* index files (including the Squat index) is 
stored per-user whereas I'd just to have just *some* of them per-user. :-)

> after upgrade come back, ask again, or meanwhile Timo gives better advice

Does this imply that questions regarding Dovecot 1.2.17 are considered 
offtopic on this list? If so, I apologize - I'll look for another forum 
then.

-- 
Frerich Raabe - raabe at froglogic.com
www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing