[Dovecot] dbox redesign

[Charles Marcus]

>> 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.

This sounds suspiciously like 'virtual folders', that are supported by 
both Evolution and Thunderbird... how do they do it?

-- 

Best regards,

Charles