Hi David,
Please find answers bellow.
Kind regards, Adam
---------- Původní e-mail ---------- Od: David Myers david.myers.24j74@gmail.com Komu: Adam adam.ranek@seznam.cz, Dovecot Mailing List dovecot@dovecot.org Datum: 7. 10. 2020 8:44:28 Předmět: Re: Version controlled (git) Maildir generated by Dovecot Hello Adam, and the dovecot list
Just a question, I hate to pollute the thread, so feel free to push these questions into a new thread if deemed necessary. So as you can guess I'm a bit of a newb here, so rather obvious questions are about to arrive....
As you are using GIT for your archive (which is a cool idea by the way) I'm sure you are well aware that not all files types play nicely with version control, my question therefore is : How do you plan to handle attachments ?
I use git for everything including for example LibreOffice / Word documents. Git works just fine with binary files. You can't use text tools like "git diff" but... it works.
Also, although I appreciate the idea of using git, emails generally don't 'change', but I guess that also depends on how you are storing them (single email with links to previous / next ... etc, or as a single big file for each specific thread). Although this is hitting my limits of understanding for how dovecot works, so I probably need educating on this (a pointer to the docs would be good).
As I mentioned in the first e-mail, I configured Dovecot to use Maildir format -> each e-mail is a single text file. Mail body + attachment(s) are in the same file, attachment(s) are Base64 encoded.
You seem concerned regarding the files that you are ignoring that you will need to 'recreate them', so why not do a complete git add . prior to adding them into the git ignore, then you have an initial state for those files too.
But I don't want to store files that can be regenerated. I don't want to backup stuff, that doesn't have information value.
Final thought, what advantage do you envisage by using git as opposed to simply using a filter to select the files over a certain age, and place them into a zipped TAR archive ? Although I guess you could eventually zip the git archive too, and in the interim it would remain searchable by your users mail clients whilt in git.
I like to use git ;-). Tar will work just fine.
In this use case the only real benefit of git is that it never forgets. Unless I delete whole .git directory, I can make a mistake, delete some e-mails (files), commit changes and rollback. I can't rollback if I delete tar archive.
Thanks in advance, and apologies once again for polluting your question with my own.
David