[Dovecot] doveadm fetch vs search+fetch

[Timo Sirainen]

On Wed, 2011-12-07 at 19:56 -0800, Joseph Tam wrote:
> > If you want to fetch message headers/bodies separately for multiple
> > messages, then doveadm search is useful. With "doveadm fetch" you can't
> > really know where one message ends and another one begins (although the
> > ^L character between messages is a good indicator, it's not 100%
> > reliable). And in any case it's more difficult to use for separating
> > messages in a shell script.
> 
> You could use, as I suggested,
> 
>  	doveadm -f tab fetch -u bob 'mailbox-guid uid' ... | \

Oh, you meant this.

>  	while read guid uid; do
>  	...
>  	done
> 
> which pretty much does the same thing (but you have to dump the first
> line, ugh!).  It doesn't matter all that much except some extra man
> page reading, but it will save you the bother of having to maintain a
> separate binary, man page, etc. for what is essentially a duplicate.

Yeah, but it's more effort to remove it than to keep it as it is :) Also
a "search" is somewhat simpler and prettier to use.