[Dovecot] SORT using cached filesystem modtimes

[Emmett Lazich]

Timo or anyone,

This may be a bug or maybe a design decision. Either way I am curious to
hear comments.

Why do the dovecot-0.99.14 server's .imap.index files contain a cached
copy of each message's date and time as supplied by the filesystem, as
opposed to the date and time found in each message header?

When testing various imap clients (eg. tbird-1.0.2, evolution-2.0,
outlook2003, squirrelmail-1.4.4) I was intrigued by the behaviour of
message date sorting. I toggled on/off the use of server side SORTing in
some imap clients, then started forcing rebuilds of .map.index files,
and eventually came to the above conclusion.

For normal dovecot server side processing, this condition (if I am
correct) may not be a problem, but if someone was to deposit a bunch of
maildir files firstly into an imap account (bypassing dovecot), and if
this person (eg. me) did not preserve the filesystem/inode file
attributes. Then dovecot appears to cache the "wrong" data. What happens
then is that some imap clients can display wrong date+times in the
message lists, and some imap clients find that server side SORTing does
not work.

Keen to hear thoughts/opinions.

-Emmett

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20050415/f3bd3fd5/attachment-0002.html>