Hello all,
[Sorry if this has been covered already - I searched back a little way in the archive and didn't find anything recent on the topic.]
I'm wondering if it is possible to customize the way dovecot creates or modifies filenames in the maildir directories?
I'm watching how my mail system works, and I see that procmail creates a
new file in the <folder>/new directory, each time an email is received.
This file is some complex combination of UIDs and things, suffixed by
the server name. So far, the filename has alphanumerics, a couple
underscores, and a dot or two only.
But once dovecot gets it's hands on the file and moves it to the
<folder>/cur directory, it starts doing "terrible" things to the file
name. Now, the filename starts to have "evil" things in it, like colons
and commas. Is there a way to change this? I'm asking this primarily
because I use dovecot as a massive long-term email archiving system.
One of the things one needs to be able to do when running a long-term
archive like this is keep things as simple and accessible as possible.
The reason I use maildir is that I totally buy into the "one email, one
file" idea - it means I don't have to store messages in big consolidated
database files that are changeable with each new version of the vendor's
software release (such as exchange DBs or Outlook PST files) or that are
horrible performers (such as mbox).
One of the nice things about the maildir "each email is a separate file" idea is that you are not limited to maildir or dovecot or any other piece of software to handle, read, and process the files. For instance, I would like to backup my maildir by using rsync to synchronize my dovecot-managed maildir to a Windows server running NFS. From there the files are synchronized via Windows DFS ( to which there is no open source solution that is even close) to several other servers around the continent. Only thing: The evil commas and colons in the filenames are anathema to Windows. So instead I tar the maildir folders to tgz files on the windows server, and the tgz's are synchronized to other DR sites.
If I could do without the need for tar (mandated solely because of the colons and commas in the dovecot filename scheme) I could minimize the time to backup (only synchronizing changes) and suddenly I would have a lot of other benefits opened up. One simple one would be that if I could configure dovecot to append the .eml extension to the end of every file (technically each file in a maildir is an eml file regardless of the extension being present or not - eml is just a raw mail file just like what you'd find in a maildir) I would have instant access to them using Search Server Express, which can read eml files but strongly prefers to use extentions to recognize files as such.
To be clear: I'm not requesting that dovecot's file naming convention be changed to match my quirky requirements - I'm just asking if it could be made configurable, so I could change it to match my needs and others could change it to match theirs. In the interests of REALLY being able to use the elegantly simple idea of each mail being a separate file, I'm trying to get more out of that great pile of folders and files I'm amassing in my mail archive server. The more use I can make of them with other software other than dovecot (i.e. data crawling, indexing, easy recovery in a catastrophe, etc) the more valuable this format is.
Is this possible?