Joseph Tam wrote:
However, I often read and modify the mailboxes locally with mutt (e.g. append and delete mails).
Should I expect any problems wit Dovecot indexes etc? What if I even do "rm ~/Mail/some/mailbox", will Dovecot be mad at me?
I do it all the time. Works fine.
Great, thank you!
As others have written, you may see performance degradation as Dovecot will have to rebuild indices, but if you have small mailboxes, this won't be too bad. The only reason I use direct file access rather than IMAP is that I'm too lazy to work out a passwordless access method. If this doesn't bother you or you can configure this (e.g. Kerberos, keyring, etc.), IMAP access is preferable since you won't pull the indices out from Dovecot's feet.
What passwordless access methods does Dovecot support? I'm more or less experienced with GSSAPI but for the present I would not like to set up a KDC somewhere on a box exposed to the Internet.
You'll also get a lot of innocuous griping in the log files about UIDVALIDITY and mailbox corruption, but they can be safely ignored.
My mail goes through procmail, so Dovecot will not be the only one to touch the mboxes anyway.
-- Victor Sudakov, VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN 2:5005/49@fidonet http://vas.tomsk.ru/