[Dovecot] virtual mailbox / INTHREAD use case, issues, questions

[Timo Sirainen]

On 4.1.2010, at 20.47, David Abrahams wrote:

> 1. I had to manually create the virtual folder for all my users or
>   they couldn't access their mail at all.  Is this fixed in 2.0?

No.

> 2. My users were getting errors when accessing via POP3.  The possible
>   meaning of such a virtual folder under POP3 is lost on me, but I
>   had to enable the virtual plugin for that protocol too.  I think
>   that should at least be in the documentation, or better yet the
>   requirement should that it be enabled for POP3 should be dropped.

I think you could put the virtual namespace inside protocol imap {} section.

> 3. I couldn't get the virtual "conversation view" inbox to show any
>   messages.  But maybe that's because of a possible issue I describe
>   below with x-mailbox
> 
> 4. At some point I ended up with an empty mailbox called
>   "private.virtual" --- I have no idea how.  Probably user error.

Dunno.

> 5. The "all" virtual mailbox would only show 89 messages.  I switched
>   it to be a mirror of my "archive" mailbox and the number started to
>   look more reasonable.  This could be the "lots of mailboxes" bug
>   describe in
>   http://dovecot.org/list/dovecot-news/2009-December/000145.html

"lots of mailboxes" should cause error to be logged.

> 6. I got the impression that looking at the virtual INBOX didn't cause
>   the "all" mailbox to be updated, which I'd guess that it should be.

It should.

> 7. I tried to create an IMAP search, rather than a virtual folder,
>   that looked for x-mailbox INBOX header like the virtual folder
>   does.  It too came up empty.  It doesn't exactly surprise me
>   because I don't see an x-mailbox header in any of these messages.

x-mailbox doesn't use a header, it uses the actual mailbox name where the message exists.

> Lastly, I want to report that for me, the speed of these IMAP searches
> doesn't begin to approach what I can do with mairix if I want a
> message's entire thread.  I'm happy to use mairix, although it would
> be nicer not to duplicate that capability if it's already in the
> server.  But it needs to be fast.  Is there something I can do to make
> it go faster?

How slow is it? How many messages do you have? I think it should be pretty fast.

Anyway, dovecot -n output and contents of dovecot-virtual file could help figuring out what your problem is.