On 12.9.2011, at 21.00, Dave Stubbs wrote:
One of the nice things about the maildir "each email is a separate file" idea is that you are not limited to maildir or dovecot or any other piece of software to handle, read, and process the files. Well, sdbox isn't good for that then anymore. Cydir backend could possibly work, although it is missing some features that dbox has and was mainly intended as an example code for super simple mailbox format. Well, maybe sdbox could still work. Just a quick question - what is the format of the u.* file? Is it still a raw (possibly partially) mime-encoded file that contains the all-important From: line, just like a mail file in a maildir folder? If so, I could sync the sdbox files elsewhere and index them if I could convince dovecot to use the filename scheme u.*.eml instead of u.*
sdbox begins with a small dbox header, followed by the message text and finally a dbox metadata footer. Something like:
2 M1e C4e327f7d ^A^BN 0000000000000906 <message text here> ^A^C R4e327f7d V94e G39670b147d7f324e0e1d000074ccac23
dbox-file.h describes the headers and lists the metadata characters and what they mean. Because of this extra metadata I don't really know if it would be a good idea to name them *.eml.
Yes, you could copy specific sdbox files elsewhere and run "doveadm force-resync" on them. All message flags would be lost though, since they're stored only in Dovecot's index files.