[Dovecot] mdbox packing

[Daniel L. Miller]

On 4/30/2012 5:23 PM, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 12:43 -0700, Daniel L. Miller wrote:
>> Is there a way to manually force an mdbox storage to be rebuilt into new
>> files?  Particularly files of the maximum size?
> You could do it with dsync.
>
>
dsync seems to do a marvelous job - new question.?

Given a mailbox with a larger number of older mails - assuming any new 
mails will have later dates - will the new mail storage files be 
identical?  I'm probably not saying the right - let me try this:

1.  "dsync backup mdbox" (with appropriate args) is run for a given user.
2.  "dsync mirror mdbox" is done just to catch up.
3.  Old mailstore moved off.
4.  New mailstore moved to active location.

I'm sure there's a safer way to do the above - but I've got a 
low-traffic site and I can just shut down mail service altogether for a 
few minutes if I want during this.

Now - repeat the above four steps.  Will mail files m.1 through m.(n-1) 
be identical to the last run?  Is this a valid packing strategy prior to 
performing an rsync type backup - assuming no changes are being made to 
the archived mails between pack runs?
-- 
Daniel