On Wed, 2007-05-16 at 06:40 -0400, Bill Boebel wrote:
Although one possibility would be treat mailboxes a bit similarly than keywords. So that when a message is copied to another mailbox, the message in dbox file is updated to contain information that it exists in such and such mailboxes. Hmm. Perhaps that would be good enough, yes.
Yes, I think treating mailboxes similary to keywords is ideal. There really is no reason to physically separate mailboxes on disk. All that is needed is this logical separation if it can be done in a reliable way.
Except if you want to handle some mailboxes in a special way it's easier if they're separated on disk. Such as renaming or deleting mailboxes is a lot easier.
Or maybe track this in mailbox-specific index files, and also have a corespodning text file that stores a list of messages that are contained in that mailbox... similar to maildir's dovecot-uidlist file. Then if you lose the index you can rebuild the index from the text file.
Except that such mailbox-messagelist file could also be counted as "index file", and losing it again loses the messages :) That's why I thought saving the mailbox name in the message file's headers would be better. If you then lose the mailbox name, you most likely have lost the message itself as well. Also it makes it easier to restore individual messages from backups.