[Dovecot] Cooperating with dovecot in its Maildir

Is it possible to cooperate with dovecot within its Maildir, and if so, what's required?

In this particular case, we're thinking of trying to allow notmuch to operate directly on the dovecot Maildir, and at the moment, the only modifications notmuch makes are to change maildir flags. Would locking dovecot-uidlist.lock be sufficient, perhaps via liblockfile?

Also, is there some reliable way to detect a dovecot Maildir? For example, are any of the dovecot-* files guaranteed to exist all the time?

Thanks

Rob Browning rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org GPG as of 2002-11-03 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4