Re: [Dovecot] More efficient Deleting of a whole folder (or Purging Trash)

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Bill Cole wrote:

For Dovecot, the mailbox index also has to be updated for each deletion, and while that in itself is not terribly expensive per message, it has to be done one message at a time to maintain consistency between the index and the real mail.

In general, this isn't really true - because Dovecot can deal with other programs accessing the Maildir, it can't treat the index as canonical.

Therefore if Dovecot knows it is deleting a whole folder, Dovecot could just as easily skip over the index updates or equivalently "decide to do them all at once at the end", at which point the index is empty.

-- Asheesh.

-- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. -- Andy Finkel, computer guy