Carlos E. R. said the following on 08/26/2013 06:15 PM:
El 2013-08-26 a las 15:03 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
Carlos E. R. said the following on 08/26/2013 01:57 PM:
No, not that.
It is removal of a complete post, because you do not want to keep it, or because you move it to another folder.
Ah. So you think its done like in VI where the lines are removed from the middle of the file?
I think not. I think that its done by a copy-and-skip.
In VI the file is buffered and the lines are taken out of the buffer and then the remainder is written out as if it were a new file.
Something like that. Certainly with IMAP that all doesn't get done until you tell the IMAP server to 'compact".
You misunderstood me.
A MUA does it by marking the post as deleted (overwriting something), and postponing the actual deletion till "compaction". Thunderbird does it on request or certains circumstances (change folder when compaction would save a certain amount). Pine does it, I think, whenver you change from one folder to another.
My experience is with IMAP so the MUA is acting as a director and the IMAP server is doing this. When I peek I see many instances of the dovecot server. It looks like there is a new instance every time I move T'bird to another folder. From this I'm concluding that it defers the compaction for as long as possible, until logout or until explicitly instructed, which, given the IMAP protocol, makes sense. So I while I may not have understood you in some aspect (as below) what we are saying about this part is much the same.
This folder has about 12000 posts and is 80MiB big. Other folders have much fewer posts but are much larger, receiving big attachments or html posts. It means that an actual insert or delete has to copy that big folder to another temporary one.
On a maildir folder, it just writes 2 or 3 small files, it is faster, in theory.
Ah. My INBOX is about 152Meg (according to ls -h) and I have no complaints about the performance of Dovecot handling it. Theory is good. Perhaps this would be different is this was not a personal setup, of that was a larger server with tends of gigs or RAM, a couple of 8 core processors and few hundred T of disk at an ISP support a few thousand concurrent users with webmail, each with INBOXes they never purged and which were many times the size of yours and mine.
It is possible to want to add an email in the middle of the "list" (because it is sorted). Yes, normally the clients will do the sorting just fine without that.
I'm not sure about that. Personally, without looking at the source, I think the MUAs do the sorting at the presentation.
True, but Pine can also write a sorted folder. Thunderbird does not, but thunderbird keeps an index file (and pine does not).
Can pine deal with threads then? I wish T'bird didn't; I wish it could make use of the capabilities of Dovecot in that regard. I wish it could use dovecot's ability to use lucine for full text indexing too and allow easy body search. I wish I could win the lottery ...
Although I do not know of a client that does it, I would like to have a client that would allow adding a comment header (and display it by default), where I could write why that post interests me - very useful for the relatively few list emails I archive; often for something they say different that what the subject line says.
Since the index files and the 'metadata' used by something like Dovecot is outside of the mbox file there is no reason why not. We're quite used to directories having a .directory file to be used by Dolphin or the like, sure, why not. I recall one file manager that allowed 'ratings' by use of icons to be attached to each file icon that was displayed - can't recall its name.
Nautilus. It overlays a little graphic over the icon, for classification.
But I meant adding a header inside mails in the mbox file, not in an index. There was a client that did it (I can't remember the name, the header might be named "X-COMMENT" or similar. Addition of headers is permitted.
It shouldn't make any difference. I can easily imagine a mail system implemented not as files but as a database where the headers are stored in different fields from the body and its easy to add another header. So what difference does it make if the metadata isn't stored with the data? The same index file that points to the message could equally well contain any number of X- extensions without including them in the message. Heck, news readers manage that; they keep track of who has read a message without making changes to the message.
Although here I have a problem there, because I still use procmail to write directly to folders. Dovecot copes with this, but I owuld like to instead (using procmail) send that email to dovecot.
My incoming mail is dragged in by fetchmail, passed to procmail and put in folders using the locking protocol procmail supports.
Yes, I do the same.
Dovecot is *NOT* a mail transfer agent, it is a IMAP/POP server. You don't 'send' email to dovecot. Dovecot is smart enough that when it sees a mbox or directory change it rescans and reindexes. One reason I have a lot of smaller folders rather than one big INBOX :-)
Oops! googling I see that dovecot does have a local delivery agent - lda. http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA It seems you need it to do filtering.
That's what I meant.
I'm doing my filtering with procmail (as I have for a few decades ...) so I don't use the LDA.
My .forward sends incoming email to procmail. The dovecot lda methods sends it to "/usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver". I gather that its an either/or situation. I'm sure you could kludge procmail to pipe though dovecot's filters, but what make it that complicated: do one or the other.
That's fine, but I'll stick with what I know works until I have a need to change.
Absolutely, but feeding it via dovecot tools would avoid having to reindex the entire folder.
Yes, so? That is only of use if you can access and make use of the dovecot index. Most MUAs can't. I'm annoyed that Thunderbird can't. It seems pointless to me that I should run Dovecot on a server and let it do indexing and full text indexing "in the background" with the intent to offload this processing and storage from my workstation and/or laptop. It seems pointless to me that I should have T'bird index things all over again. Yes, I know about https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Using_Gloda and I have found information on that less than useful and experimentation frustrating. This https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Thunderbird/Gloda_indexing leads me to believe that in IMAP mode T'bird does a lot of indexing that would be redundant of it could access the dovecot metadata. There is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/glodaquilla-search-indexi... but is it what we are talking about? I don't think so. -- How long did the whining go on when KDE2 went on KDE3? The only universal constant is change. If a species can not adapt it goes extinct. That's the law of the universe, adapt or die. -- Billie Walsh, May 18 2013 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org