[Dovecot] Possible to Customize File Naming Scheme?

[Dave Stubbs]

Hello all,

[Sorry if this has been covered already - I searched back a little way 
in the archive and didn't find anything recent on the topic.]

I'm wondering if it is possible to customize the way dovecot creates or 
modifies filenames in the maildir directories?

I'm watching how my mail system works, and I see that procmail creates a 
new file in the <folder>/new directory, each time an email is received.  
This file is some complex combination of UIDs and things, suffixed by 
the server name.  So far, the filename has alphanumerics, a couple 
underscores, and a dot or two only.

But once dovecot gets it's hands on the file and moves it to the 
<folder>/cur directory, it starts doing "terrible" things to the file 
name.  Now, the filename starts to have "evil" things in it, like colons 
and commas.  Is there a way to change this?  I'm asking this primarily 
because I use dovecot as a massive long-term email archiving system.  
One of the things one needs to be able to do when running a long-term 
archive like this is keep things as simple and accessible as possible.  
The reason I use maildir is that I totally buy into the "one email, one 
file" idea - it means I don't have to store messages in big consolidated 
database files that are changeable with each new version of the vendor's 
software release (such as exchange DBs or Outlook PST files) or that are 
horrible performers (such as mbox).

One of the nice things about the maildir "each email is a separate file" 
idea is that you are not limited to maildir or dovecot or any other 
piece of software to handle, read, and process the files.  For instance, 
I would like to backup my maildir by using rsync to synchronize my 
dovecot-managed maildir to a Windows server running NFS.  From there the 
files are synchronized via Windows DFS ( to which there is no open 
source solution that is even close) to several other servers around the 
continent.  Only thing:  The evil commas and colons in the filenames are 
anathema to Windows.  So instead I tar the maildir folders to tgz files 
on the windows server, and the tgz's are synchronized to other DR sites.

If I could do without the need for tar (mandated solely because of the 
colons and commas in the dovecot filename scheme) I could minimize the 
time to backup (only synchronizing changes) and suddenly I would have a 
lot of other benefits opened up.  One simple one would be that if I 
could configure dovecot to append the .eml extension to the end of every 
file (technically each file in a maildir is an eml file regardless of 
the extension being present or not - eml is just a raw mail file just 
like what you'd find in a maildir) I would have instant access to them 
using Search Server Express, which can read eml files but strongly 
prefers to use extentions to recognize files as such.

To be clear:  I'm not requesting that dovecot's file naming convention 
be changed to match my quirky requirements - I'm just asking if it could 
be made configurable, so I could change it to match my needs and others 
could change it to match theirs.  In the interests of REALLY being able 
to use the elegantly simple idea of each mail being a separate file, I'm 
trying to get more out of that great pile of folders and files I'm 
amassing in my mail archive server.  The more use I can make of them 
with other software other than dovecot (i.e. data crawling, indexing, 
easy recovery in a catastrophe, etc) the more valuable this format is.

Is this possible?