[Dovecot] mdbox: Cannot create subfolder called "dbox-Mails" (2.0beta5)

William Blunn bill+dovecot at blunn.org
Sat Jul 3 11:29:43 EEST 2010


Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 2.7.2010, at 23.39, William Blunn wrote:
>
>   
>> William Blunn wrote:
>>     
>>> The folder name 'dbox-Mails' is comprised of two normal words, and combined in a way which makes a relatively meaningful phrase.
>>>       
>> ... especially in this context!
>>
>> The things we are naming are e-mail folders, i.e. folders which contain e-mails or "Mails".
>>
>> So the suffix "-Mails" is actually quite likely!
>>     
>
> I doubt it. Plus there are already lots of installations who have .dovecot.sieve files in their maildirs, which makes it impossible to create a mailbox "sieve" whose parent is "dovecot". I've tried to educate them as much as possible everywhere I know of, but it's still common.
>
> Anyway, I think the dbox-Mails is a pretty good compromise. The name needs to be informative enough for sysadmins and unlikely enough to be used by users. It's also case-sensitive in most filesystems, so dbox-mails or Dbox-Mails would be fine too.
>
> Anyway, the long term solution is to get rid of mailbox names in filesystem entirely and just use mailbox GUIDs and a mailbox list index. For now I think dbox-Mails is fine.

Thank-you for taking the time to consider this issue.

OK I see what you're saying.

In thinking about how I was going to think about this, I came up with 
the idea below, which is worth mentioning, though as you say the likely 
eventuality is for the problem to go away by another means.

Taking into account the additional requirement to make things easy for 
the sysadmin, one idea would be to make the special value be something 
like "DbOx-mAiLs".

That way it should still be abundantly mnemonic for the sysadmin, but 
the unusual casing reduces the likelyhood of collisions to negligible.

In fact the unusual casing might even serve as as clue/reminder to the 
sysadmin that this is not a mail folder, but rather part of the storage 
format, so might be more helpful to the sysadmin than "dbox-Mails".

Bill


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