[Dovecot] Simulating UW Snarf...

[Curtis Maloney]

Todd Piket wrote:
> This is bascially what UW-IMAP does.  It is quite handy in our 
> situation.  The problem with doing this with Dovecot and/or Maildir is, 
> I believe, you must introduce some kind of locking mechanism in 
> /var/mail/%u because the delivery agent and Dovecot may step on each 
> other's toes otherwise.  Since locking is "bad" in maildir this is not 
> ideal.

Two points.

1) There's nothing to say /var/mail/%u can't be mbox.  Dovecot already supports 
the INBOX being a different format to the rest of the mail.  Handy if you don't 
run a Maildir capable LDA (but who does that? :)

2) Maildir was designed to not need locking.  If dovecot tries to move a mail 
out of /new, it knows implicitly that the LDA is finished with it.  This is 
because the LDA doesn't rename() new mail into /new from /tmp until it's 
finished writing it.

For some reason I recall there being an "on login" script hook possible with 
dovecot - if nothing else, just wrap the imap binary.  This script could iterate 
over the /var/mail/%u/new/ directory, moving each file to ~/Maildir/tmp, then 
/new, and bailing out when it hits quota full.

Or am I missing some complexity here?

--
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney at cardgate.net