Hello,
I have a setup where there are multiple maildir users, one of them being the pop/imap server itself, the others are for example a maildir capable webmail and message replication.
I would like to evaluate Dovecot, but I wonder how would its binary indexes and logs fit into this picture.
After running through http://wiki.dovecot.org/IndexFiles I'm not sure how well would Dovecot work with other programs modifying the maildirs (adding, deleting, moving messages, folders etc). The "Main index" section says "The index file is synchronized against mailbox only if the syncing information changes.", where syncing information consists or cur and new directories' timestamps. Does that mean I am safe there?
The cache file is hopefully just a cache, so it won't contain information from messages which are inserted or moved by an external program, and I assume Dovecot fetches the message lists and other information from the main index, which seems to be OK.
The transaction log is for the main index, so if the latter is OK, the former should be OK too.
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir talks about MUAs and there nothing scary can be found, except for some temporary conditions, where the changes won't propagate to Dovecot in real time, but it's OK.
Are the above right, and can Dovecot use its indexes and caches safely with others using the same maildirs?
Thanks,