Lazy Expunge - why oh why deprecating namespace storage for this

Matt Bryant matt at the-bryants.net
Thu Sep 1 04:18:56 UTC 2022


Hi Dovecot,

Noticed on your web site that you have marked lazy_expunge storage 
location to namespace as deprecated since v2.3.0 and suggest a single 
mailbox with acl is the way to go. This seems to be a backward step for 
those that make use of the alt storage facility.

Is there anyway we can persuade you NOT to deprecate this - it still 
works atm

Why ? Well scenario time ....

Installations make use of alt-storage feature so that new messages can 
be stored along with indexes etc on faster storage, whilst offloading 
older less viewed mail to a different storage tier.

With storage to namespace - that namespace can have a location set that 
separates it from the mailbox (maybe even on a 3rd tier of storage) BUT 
with the mailbox solution then any deleted mail will in fact return from 
the alternate storage to the primary storage, and then will need to have 
a job run to alt-move it back off the faster storage to sit with the 
older messages and also can no longer be a potential 3rd tier of storage.

This seems crazy and in fact some of reason mdbox is avoided since 
purging an mdbox means that any messages on alt-storage gets pulled back 
to primary storage.

Alternately are there plans to allow a mailbox to have a 'location' in 
which case the location of the expunge mailbox could be set differently ?

rgds

Matt



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