[Dovecot] Shared Squat index for public mailboxes

[Frerich Raabe]

Hi,

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 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?

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