[dovecot] Re: message order reversed on copying

[Charlie Brady]

On 6 Apr 2003, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On Sat, 2003-04-05 at 10:15, Kimura Fuyuki wrote:
> > I noticed an annoying behavior of dovecot: the message order (sequence
> > numbering) is reversed on COPYing in the maildir.
> > 
> > I suspect that the following code in maildir-save.c is working like
> > "pushing".
> 
> Order for new mails is currently the same as the order in which
> readdir() returns the mails. I guess some filesystems list the files in
> the order they were written to the directory, but many don't. It anyway
> can't be relied on, so I won't even try.
> 
> Better fix for this comes once I add support for UIDPLUS IMAP extension.
> That requires knowing the new UID for mail in destination mailbox, so I
> have to update the indexes immediately, which also saves the mail order
> permanently.

You shouldn't need to do that. All you need to do is to sort the new 
message files (by name or by mtime - by name will be faster), before 
processing them. I remember fixing this same problem in the maildir 
patches for UW-imap, and this is pretty much all it took:

-  if (!(dir = opendir (tmp)))
-    return;
 
-  while (d = readdir (dir)) {
-    if (d->d_name[0] == '.')
-      continue;                        /* skip .files */
+  nfiles = scandir (tmp, &names, NULL, maildir_namesort);
+  for (i = 0; i < nfiles; i++)
+  {
+    struct direct *d = names[i];
 
     sprintf (file,"%s/../new/%s",LOCAL->dir,d->d_name);
                                /* make sure this is a normal file */
-    if (stat (file,&sbuf) == 0 && S_ISREG (sbuf.st_mode)) {
+    if (d->d_name[0] != '.' && stat (file, &sbuf) == 0 && S_ISREG (sbuf.st_mode))
+    {

As a workaround, Kimura, you can delete dovecot's .imap.* index files, and 
the new UIDs will be sorted again - until next time.

--
Charlie