[Dovecot] Is it safe to manipulate Maildir files directly?
Steffen Kaiser
skdovecot at smail.inf.fh-brs.de
Tue Nov 5 09:22:57 EET 2013
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On Mon, 4 Nov 2013, David Henkel-Wallace wrote:
> is it safe to manipulate files in Maildir/xxx directly or will Dovecot
if "xxx" does not include the Dovecot-related index files etc., then yes.
> become unstable if I don't make these changes by talking to Dovecot and
> having it make the changes? (I'm running 2.1.7 under Wheezy, IMAP only)
>
> My specific application: I am running spamassassin and would like users
> to be able to submit spam (and ham) directly by moving it into special
> folders. A cron job can then find it and take action: feed spam
> messages to the bayesian trainer and then delete them; feed ham messages
> to the trainer and then move them into ~/Maildir/cur/
I did this before switching to antispam.
I use antispam with spool2dir now, that central directory has a inotify
watcher that trains the messages instantly.
> Having the cron job find the messages and train spamassassin is no
> problem. The question is how to move the messages. Is it safe to
> simply rename the files from my cron job?
You mean "ham -> ~/Maildir/cur"? Yes, but there is a slight chance, that
an user already copy'ed the message there. If the stem of the filename,
the part before the colon ":", is already present in the Maildir/cur or
~~/new, Dovecot might gets confused. I think all present versions generate
an error in the sense "duplicate found, fixed by renaming into something".
I did not moved the message files from "ham" into the INBOX. I named the
folders: spam/yes and spam/no, all my users moved messages into spam/yes,
but copied them into spam/no and moved them themselves into their correct
mailbox. Maybe, you can avoid that step, too.
- --
Steffen Kaiser
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