[Dovecot] mailutil?

[Timo Sirainen]

On Mar 26, 2009, at 6:35 PM, Curtis Maloney wrote:

>>> I was going to suggest this ... something to at least go through  
>>> and clean up the size flags on Maildir (which seems worthwhile,  
>>> especially for people using quotas).
>> They are not flags, they are part of the base maildir filename. If  
>> you change them, the message shows up as new. And in any case they  
>> should never be wrong..
>
> That's what I meant... flags in the filename (sorry if my  
> terminology is a little off.)
>
> I agree they "should" never be wrong, but that's the point of a  
> cleanup tool, isn't it?  To fix cases where that "should" assertion  
> fails.

Maybe. But I've rarely heard of people having this problem, so I don't  
really see it worth the trouble.

>
> What about someone moving from not having sizes/quotas, to having  
> it? Wouldn't it be nice if they could update all of their files at  
> once -- much like the option to re-index.

No. Like I said, it gives messages new UIDs, which causes IMAP clients  
to re-download the mails and POP3 clients that leave mail on server  
will receive them as duplicates. Not a good idea.

One thing I could do about this is to make it save the S sizes to  
dovecot-uidlist, similar to how W sizes are already saved. That'd just  
require fixing also the Maildir++ quota code to use dovecot-uidlist.

>>> Additional to this would be (plugin permitting) to compress  
>>> Maildir, or recompress+reindex mbox (Am I right in thinking  
>>> compressed mbox can be appended to, but not modified?  In which  
>>> case recompressing could likely save some extra space.)
>> There is no compression code in Dovecot right now. But you can use  
>> standard gzip tools to do such things to an existing mbox. Yes, you  
>> can append more messages to it.
>
> I seem to be having a lot of trouble communicating of late .. :(
>
> Yes, I realise the compression is a plugin (hence the 'plugin  
> permitting') ... I just thought that having an offline tool to help  
> clean up would be nice.  Perhaps some way to hook it into an expunge  
> phase (seems most logical to me, at least)...

I meant the zlib plugin can only do uncompression, not compression. So  
compression would require all new functionality.

> Ah well... you asked for input on what people would like in such a  
> "dovetool"... that's mine :)

I was hoping slightly less obscure uses :)

> As for naming, I don't agree with "doveadm" and such, as this  
> appears to more be a tool for managing mail stores, NOT for admining  
> Dovecot itself -- what I've seen so far suggests it could be used on  
> ANY mail store, not just one used by Dovecot.

It might have some admining functions too. Like someone mentioned  
verifying ACLs. Perhaps it might also be used to set them. And who  
knows, maybe in future Dovecot has built-in features to create/delete/ 
manage users themselves too :)