[Dovecot] dbox redesign

[Bill Boebel]

On Sat, May 12, 2007 9:10 am, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> said:

> Fast copying
> ============
> 
> Would be nice if copying a message from one mailbox to another wouldn't
> require actually reading+writing the whole message contents. But I can't
> really figure out how to implement this without requiring that there is
> only a single dbox storage which contains the mails for all the
> mailboxes, and the mailboxes themselves are just Dovecot's index files
> containing pointers to the dbox storage.
> 
> The problem with having everything in one storage is that if the index
> files are broken, the messages can't be placed into correct mailboxes
> anymore.
> 
> Although one possibility would be treat mailboxes a bit similarly than
> keywords. So that when a message is copied to another mailbox, the
> message in dbox file is updated to contain information that it exists in
> such and such mailboxes. Hmm. Perhaps that would be good enough, yes.
> 

Yes, I think treating mailboxes similary to keywords is ideal.  There really is no reason to physically separate mailboxes on disk.  All that is needed is this logical separation if it can be done in a reliable way.

Or maybe track this in mailbox-specific index files, and also have a corespodning text file that stores a list of messages that are contained in that mailbox... similar to maildir's dovecot-uidlist file.  Then if you lose the index you can rebuild the index from the text file.

Bill