On 23/07/2017 3:30 PM, Sami Ketola wrote:
On 23 Jul 2017, at 16.14, Tom Hendrikx <t...@whyscream.net> wrote:
In general, you should not do this. When a message is stored using IMAP,
it is immutable. The IMAP server also remembers things like size and
assigns messages a unique ID, so mail readers that have already
downloaded the message with that ID, don't have to download the whole
message again to verify whether it's contents have magically changed.
What you're suggesting is not simply compatible with IMAP standards.
The normal way of applying changes to messages is just like a mail
client connecting to IMAP: create a new message and save it to the
store, then delete the old one.
Just like that. But instead of using IMAP interface to do it, you can also do
it with doveadm:
1. doveadm fetch mail
2. doveadm delete mail
3. modify fetched mail
4. doveadm import modified mail back
Simple as that. There is no other supported way to do it. Editing mail objects
on storage will break things.
Sami
Thank you, that's an interesting idea. Exporting the mail and deleting
it is easy enough, but I'm not sure where I would import the message
from. doveadm import expects a mailbox store as source, so I'm back to
the problem of safely writing emails in a mailbox store format that
Dovecot understands!
I can export to Maildir format [doveadm backup -u USER
"maildir:/mymaildir:LAYOUT=fs"], where each file contains one message
and nothing else, but even that has extra files like dovecot-uidlist,
dovecot.index.cache, etc. I'm not sure if it's safe to import from a
Maildir where the message contents have been modified, but the other
files haven't.
Also, would the import create new UIDs? I probably want UIDs to change,
so that the IMAP client re-downloads the messages. I'd want to preserve
IMAP flags like "Seen", though and, ideally, the sequence of messages
inside a mailbox.
