On 13/05/2010 10:14, William Blunn wrote:
I am trying out "mdbox" under Dovecot 2.0beta5.
Looking in the "mailboxes" directory under the mdbox storage root
("~/dbox" in my case), I can see that the mail folders are mapped into
filesystem directories.
But Dovecot seems to put all the message list information
("dovecot.index.cache", "dovecot.index.log") for any given mail folder
into a directory called "dbox-Mails"...
But this directory name exists in the same namespace as that used for
mail subfolders...
So this means we cannot create a mail subfolder whose name is
"dbox-Mails"!
Looking at some new (1 Sep 2010) documentation from Timo at
http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailLocation, it looks like in the meantime we
have grown a new configuration directive "DIRNAME" which can be used in
the mailbox location specification to change the metadata directory name
to something other than the default "dbox-Mails".
So if site mail admins are concerned about clashes with user mail
folders called "dbox-Mails" they can choose another name for the
metadata directory.
OK fine so far, but then I saw the next bit.
We can also use "DIRNAME" with Maildir (if we have also specified
LAYOUT=fs) to specify that {new,cur,tmp} folders should be stored in a
subdirectory named by DIRNAME. This prevents clashes between user mail
folder names and the {new,cur,tmp} folders. It is then up to the site
admin to choose a value for DIRNAME which they think won't clash with
user mail folder names.
OK, but then it occurred to me, if we can use DIRNAME with Maildir, how
about LAYOUT with dbox?
How about having the ability to specify Maildir++ folder layout under
dbox? For example:
# Note: Following configuration line is hypothetical
mail_location = mdbox:~/mdbox:LAYOUT=maildir++
~/mdbox/mailboxes/dbox-Mails (mail folder INBOX)
~/mdbox/mailboxes/.foo/dbox-Mails (mail folder foo)
~/mdbox/mailboxes/.foo.bar/dbox-Mails (mail folder foo/bar)
~/mdbox/mailboxes/.foo.bar.baz/dbox-Mails (mail folder foo/bar/baz)
One upshot of this would be that user folder names would be in a
different namespace to the DIRNAME folder.
Also for admins who prefer fewer filesystem directory levels, this would
make them happy because all the mail folder levels would be at a single
directory level in the filesystem.
I suppose another upshot would be that it would look more like
Maildir++, which admins may already be familiar with, and might provide
a smoother/easier (mental) transition to dbox for admins.
Bill
