Hello,

I've been playing around with using namespaces to change the way messages are stored. My idea was to use mbox for archival stuff, like this:

 namespace private {
     separator = .
     hidden = no
     inbox = yes
     prefox =
     location = maildir:%h/Maildir
 }
 namespace private {
     separator = .
     hidden = no
     prefix = "INBOX.Archive."
     location = mbox:%h/Maildir/Archive
 }

This works *GREAT*, and I'm really pleased with it. However, it occurred to me that for deeply frozen archives, it might be nice to gzip them. Conveniently, there's the zlib plugin. From what I could tell from the documentation, the compressed mbox names must end in ".gz", so I thought I could simply go into ~/Maildir/Archive and gzip everything. But when I did that, Dovecot started behaving strangely.

First of all, the result of LIST shows the files like this:

 * LIST (\NoInferiors \Marked) "." "INBOX.Archive.Friends.gz"

Which is obviously wrong. When I try to SELECT it, I get this:

 ? SELECT "INBOX.Archive.Friends.gz"
 ? NO Mailbox doesn't exist: Friends/gz

Which seems to indicate that Dovecot is treating the dot in the extension as the separator (understandably), and failing. However, if I leave off the extension, I get this:

 ? SELECT "INBOX.Archive.Friends"
 ? NO Mailbox doesn't exist: Friends

Which seems to indicate that Dovecot isn't translating "Friends" into "Friends.gz" for some reason.

Then I remembered that in the ChangeLog, back in May, the zlib plugin was changed to look for the zlib header rather than the Z flag. I assume that was for using it with Maildirs, but I figured it was worth a shot. So I renamed the Friends.gz file to remove the extension. But that just gives me an error message:

 ? SELECT "INBOX.Archive.Friends"
 ? NO Mailbox isn't a valid mbox file

It seems like loading the zlib plugin either doesn't have any effect, or I'm not doing it right. I have it in the config file along with other plugins that work just fine:

 mail_plugins = fts fts_squat zlib

And when I check that with dovecot -p, it shows up:

 mail_plugins: fts fts_squat zlib

There's no entry in the plugin {} section of the config file for the zlib plugin... but I assume that none is necessary.

Am I doing something wrong?

~Kyle

No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous. -- Samuel Johnson, on the behavior of the British colonists in America