Steinar Bang sb@dod.no:
I can see one issue with it, when using rsync to back up the mailboxes to a different machine: since the file names of the articles change when they are read, and when the state changes, rsync may ending up transferring the same article more than once (unless it has some clever checksumming to recognize files that may be the same when the name has changed), but in practice I don't think that will be much of a problem.
I googled for rsync and maildir, and found this: http://www.nabble.com/Rsync-snapshots,-Maildir,-and-Sarbanes-Oxley-td1191416...
It mentions using the --fuzzy flag. From the rsync man page: -y, --fuzzy This option tells rsync that it should look for a basis file for any destination file that is missing. The current algorithm looks in the same directory as the destination file for either a file that has an identical size and modified-time, or a simi‐ larly-named file. If found, rsync uses the fuzzy basis file to try to speed up the transfer.
Note that the use of the --delete option might get rid of any
potential fuzzy-match files, so either use --delete-after or
specify some filename exclusions if you need to prevent this.(and a note to myself on the last bit: I'm currently using --archive --delete, so that's something to look out for. I guess that my new arguments will be --archive --fuzzy --delete-after)