[Dovecot] Read-only mbox files

[Timo Sirainen]

On Fri, 2011-09-09 at 20:44 +0100, Tim Bishop wrote:

> The setup is that my main namespace points at my Maildir mail folders.
> In addition to this I have a second namespace that points at some old
> archived mbox folders. I rarely need to access these folders, but when I
> do Dovecot modifies the files (adding UID headers, etc).
> 
> What I'd like to do is make it so that Dovecot can't change these files.
> I thought there might be a setting to mark a mail_location as read-only,
> but I can't find anything like that. I've looked at ACLs too, but they
> seem to be more about user access that what Dovecot can do to files.

Not possible without modifying Dovecot code, and seems like such a
rarely wanted feature that it's not really worth the trouble, especially
because..:

> I could just do this at the filesystem level, but I'd feel a bit happier
> about working with Dovecot rather than trying to work around it.

Yeah, just chmod a-w them and that'll work. You don't want anything
modifying them anyway, right? So seems like a pretty clean solution to
me.