Cache unseen count

[Timo Sirainen]

On 10 Feb 2016, at 17:30, Jorge Carling <gfinetin2 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> Lately I am working on PHP mail account management application. It has, among others, Unread messages count column.
> To get the number of unread messages, I execute "doveadm search" command for each database row.
> The search time for single account is about 0.03 seconds. Our system has around 750 accounts, so the total loading time is currently around 20 seconds.
> When setting up Dovecot, I made the user_query, which is also used to store the message quota, and total number of messages stored in particular mailbox.
> Is there a keyword that can be included in the user_query, or some other way to maintain the unread messages count in the database? Maybe there is a way to execute a script every time a message is received, or becomes read, or unread.

It's much faster if you use:

doveadm mailbox status -A unseen '*'

Also if you enable mailbox_list_index=yes it's even faster. If you're using Maildir format you can also enable maildir_very_dirty_syncs=yes. If it's still not fast enough, it would require keeping the unseen counts in some kind of a database, but that would require writing a new plugin.