- Don Russell [2007-07-16 10:23]:
Can we delete maildir files directly from the file system? [...] And if we cannot delete files with the 'rm' command, whats the best/proper way to delete these older files.
My opinion has always been that the data structure should not be replied upon.... if you want to do things with your mail items, then use the APIs/imap commands to do it. That protects you from any internal stuff you didn't know about, or changed from one server to another, or one version to another.
Maildir is a sort of a standard with some sort of an API, isn't it? The "standard" (<http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html>) says following:
An MUA can read and delete messages while new mail is being
delivered: each message is stored in a separate file with a
unique name, so it isn't affected by operations on other messages.For example, I have the beginnings of a script to handle my "mail retention policies". It connects to Dovecot/imap to get the list of mail for specific folders, then uses the imap delete (or copy) API to delete mail older than n days, or to keep only the most recent n messages. That sort of thing.
With Maildir it's trivial to do this sort of things with a shell script.
The benefit is my script then doesn't care how Dovecot (or whichever server) stores things.... and if a mailbox changes from mbox to maildir format, or similar change.. no worries... my script just doesn't care... it always uses the APIs to manipulate mail.
Safe, but admittedly not as fast. I favor reliability over speed in these sorts of cases. :-)
That's a valid point. It's much easier to shoot one's own leg pretty ugly, when deleting/renaming/whatevert the files in the Maildir directly. IMAP SEARCH is IMHO a bit easier to understand than find(1).
Best wishes, Kirill
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