[Dovecot] deliver saving mails with hard linking

[Timo Sirainen]

On Jun 1, 2008, at 11:59 PM, Karsten Bräckelmann wrote:

>> - Am I forgetting something?..
>
> Cleaning up?  Quoting the part from option (2) of your previous mail,
> which this seems to implement:
>
>> All messages could be then stored in some global
>> directory and hard linked from there to users' mailboxes.
>
> When reading that I already wondered about cleaning up and freeing  
> disk
> space. If every recipient deleted their own "copy of the mail", the
> inodes link count will go down to 1 due to the still existing global
> copy. But it will survive despite being "deleted" (from the collective
> users POV), occupying disk space -- and possibly keeping data around
> that is assumed to be removed.

I think my previous mail about it described some persistent uniqueness  
checks. This patch is only about delivery-time hard linking. If two  
different deliveries sent the same message they would be stored using  
different files. So the deliver wrapper script would be like:

cat > tempfile
deliver -p tempfile -d user1
deliver -p tempfile -d user2
rm -f tempfile

The result would be that user1 and user2 had the same file with link  
count 2 and the file is gone when both of them delete it.
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