[Dovecot] Simulating UW Snarf...

[Todd Piket]

Curtis,

Point 1 is/was taken into consideration, but we don't actually want the 
INBOX to remain in /var/mail/%u so using that feature of Dovecot doesn't 
get us anywhere at MTU.

Point 2 however has definitely piqued my interest.  I will be exploring 
both options with enthusiasm starting tomorrow.  Thank you so much for 
your ideas in this regard.  As a Dovecot newbie I am not yet as familiar 
with it as you and others on this list are.  I forgot that it does 
indeed spawn a binary that I can easily wrap.

Again I thank you.  This will probably do the trick though if anyone 
else would like to chime in I'm still all ears.

Regards,

  ------------------------------------------------------------
| Todd Piket                        | Email: todd at mtu.edu    |
| Programmer/Analyst                | Phone: (906) 487-1720  |
| Distributed Computing Services    |                        |
| Michigan Technological University |                        |
  ------------------------------------------------------------


Curtis Maloney wrote:
> 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