Re: [Dovecot] "Maintenance instance"

Quoting Timo Sirainen tss@iki.fi:

On 24.10.2010, at 11.36, Edgar Fuß wrote:

...

...

and gives any user logging in a canned mail (e.g. "We're doing maintenance, go away") Wouldn't a client that keeps local copies of all IMAP boxes then
synchronize to that canned state, i.e., delete all locally cached
mails?

I'm pretty sure they will. I'm not aware of any good way to handle
this, other than ALERTs.

Isn't this the exact reason to return the UNAVAILABLE response (RFC 5530)?

UNAVAILABLE
      Temporary failure because a subsystem is down.  For example, an
      IMAP server that uses a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
      (LDAP) or Radius server for authentication might use this
      response code when the LDAP/Radius server is down.

      C: a LOGIN "fred" "foo"
      S: a NO [UNAVAILABLE] User's backend down for maintenance