[Dovecot] Date sort-order ignoring timezone, and a few Q's.

Stuart Henderson stu at spacehopper.org
Mon Jul 7 03:51:20 EEST 2003


Timo, thanks for writing and releasing Dovecot. I've recently
discovered it and have been very impressed at the speed and balance
between flexibility and simplicity.

I had to make a packet-trace to be sure that encryption with OpenSSL was
working correctly, since it all 'just worked' first time without complex
configuration, which I don't think I've ever seen before ;-) LDAP too
was quite straightforward (after I worked out where my virtual-domain
schema differed from what was required).

One small glitch I have noticed is that when the client requests a list
of messages sorted by date, the timezone is ignored.

For example, listed in descending order:

07/07/2003 00:01 +0300 (= 21:01 UT)
06/07/2003 23:15 +0100 (= 22:15 UT)
06/07/2003 19:03 +0100 (= 18:03 UT)

I think that this should instead be...

06/07/2003 23:15 +0100 (= 22:15 UT)
07/07/2003 00:01 +0300 (= 21:01 UT)
06/07/2003 19:03 +0100 (= 18:03 UT)

It's most noticable when the client (Mulberry in my case) is configured
to display all times in the local timezone. (Mulberry has recently added
custom flags which work perfectly with Dovecot - I was hoping this would
be the case, and was one of the reasons I was looking for something to
replace the version of Courier I previously had installed). Mulberry 
does
like to have NAMESPACE otherwise it usually asks for folder locations on
connecting, btw. No real problem, though.

A little tip: if anyone is interested in having their MDA write Maildir
with CR+LF so that sendfile(2) can be used on all messages (not just 
those
created by Dovecot), Exim offers this natively by adding the "use_crlf"
option to the appendfile transport which seems to work fine with 0.99.10
(though not 0.99.9.1, maybe because of 2003-06-04 17:39 in Changelog).

It seems Dovecot is using the ,W= Maildir tag for some type of size
instead of ,S= but I haven't traced far enough to work out what exactly
W/virtual_size means, am I right in guessing that it might be 'wire 
size'
i.e. message-size-with-CRLF-line-endings? (If so, use_crlf in exim.conf
can be augmented with "maildir_tag = ,W=$message_size" to help keep
overheads to a minimum).

And, one final question: for a dual-stack machine to listen on both IPv6
and IPv4 sockets, is the currently preferred option simply to start two
instances of Dovecot with their own dovecot.conf containing different
*_listen parameters?

--Stu



More information about the dovecot mailing list