[Dovecot] Roadmap to future

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Sat Dec 8 14:16:54 EET 2007


On Sat, 2007-12-08 at 14:02 +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> > You mention some problems like unique ID's.  This is actually pretty 
> > simple - just use some GUID type process.  All you need is something 
> > guaranteed unique on each server, combinations of time, something unique 
> > per server and some randomness get you there.  Discount anything which 
> > is some kind of counter because it will break eventually.
> 
> It will have global UIDs which it uses internally. I hadn't thought much
> yet how those would be generated, but they're not the problem. The
> problem is IMAP protocol where it's not possible to use them. IMAP
> requires using a growing 32bit integer as the UID. There's no way around
> that, so IMAP UID conflicts can happen and they have to be handled
> somehow.
> 
> The IMAP UID conflicts are detected by a message having the same IMAP
> UID but different global UIDs. So the replication then just needs to
> make a new global UID -> IMAP UID mapping for both of the messages to
> fix the problem.

Although if you just want to keep the servers synchronized and use
completely different clients for them, then there's no need to keep IMAP
UIDs synchronized.

I was thinking more about a setup where a client could connect to any of
the replicated servers. If you just need to have for example Dovecot on
a laptop where the mail client on laptop always connects only to the
laptop Dovecot, there's no problem with IMAP UID conflicts.

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