[Dovecot] revision control on maildir possible?

[Steffen Kaiser]

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On Sun, 14 Feb 2010, Markus Beyer wrote:

> I was wondering if it is possible to put a dovecot managed maildir under 
> a vcs like system, for example git or bzr. I'd like to have a seamless 
> history of all mail going in and out of my mailboxes, so a vcs like 
> system seams a good choice for me. I'm not quite sure however if that 
> would cause any problems to dovecot and what the best way of handling 
> commits would be.

Hmm,

+ avoid to create ".*" files in your Maildir base directory. I don't know 
bzr, but IMHO git creates a single .git directory, hence, you should 
create the repo at the same level as the Maildir, e.g.:

.git/
Maildir/
Maildir/new
Maildir/cur
Maildir/tmp

Subversion won't work, because it creates a .SVN directory in each 
versioned directory. They will be misunderstood as mailbox.

+ avoid to version the index files, they are binary anyway.

+ avoid the content of all tmp/ dirs.

+ Maybe: instead of to blacklist files, use a whitelist:
anything in cur/ and new/, subscriptions, maildirfolder, dovecot-uidlist, 
dovecot-keywords,& others like .dovecot-shared, .dovecot-acl, sieve/ ...

+ message files are renamed, when their status or keywords / labels / tags 
change, either you live with these duplicates or you need to keep track of 
the filename changes by looking at the filename stem (up to, but not 
including the colon); some VCSs can keep track of filename changes.
The same applies when messages are "seen" and moved from new/ to cur/.

+ when you move/copy messages around, you could track them by their 
message id, in order to avoid duplicates.

+ You can use a script to wrap deliver to trigger add/remove for the 
Maildir. But I think to schedule the sync would be better.

====

IMHO, if you want to avoid duplicates, a VCS does not seem to fit. Or you 
could delay the checkin for, say, one day, one could argue that then the 
messages are read, spooled in the "final" mailbox, tagged a.s.o.

Regards,

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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