[Dovecot] remove messages once downloaded

[Timo Sirainen]

On 26.2.2012, at 13.52, Ed W wrote:

> On 25/02/2012 00:39, Timo Sirainen wrote:
>> On 24.2.2012, at 19.44, julioarr at fisica.uh.cu wrote:
>> 
>>> I need some help with the dovecot configuration. I want to remove
>>> downloaded messages from Mail Server once the messages have been
>>> successfully downloaded by pop3-clients, even when the clients have been
>>> configured to save copy of messages in the Server.
>> Not possible.
>> 
> 
> If you were thinking about longer term TODOs then I have a similar problem (just adding a "me too"...)
> 
> In my industry, competing solutions offer a kind of server side "been downloaded" notification when customers have actually downloaded (ie "read" via POP) the message.  The customers are all on the far side of expensive satellite links, so this serves as an inexpensive proxy for "message read" notifications.

What does the notification do?

> Is it feasible to implement both of these solutions using the current plugin architecture?

Yes.

> I think our competition implement such features because they are Exchange based and I believe you can write server side hooks in various scripting languages quite easily (I personally don't like the idea, but someone obviously did it once and it rolled from there...) - this obviously harking to the "is it feasible to imagine some higher level hook solution for simpler plugin creation" suggestion from a few days ago?
> 
> All these "do something when it's accessed" or "do something when it's deleted" problems all feel kind of related to me (ie we need some hook which runs on a per message basis). Perhaps someone smarter than me can think of a better way to unify them?

Dovecot has a "notify" plugin that makes things like this pretty easy to implement, but it still needs C coding.