Re: Question about mail archive

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:
> >>>>> prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc):
> > Well, some of the things nnmaildir does could be added to other
> > backends without too much trouble, I think.  Especially since nnimap
> > already stores marks, it could renumber articles for each
> > server-open;
> 
> Does that mean nnimap would work with the qmail/courier combination?

It could.  The backend needs to keep a list in memory associating
article numbers with persistent message idetifiers - that's the price.
When scanning for articles, you take all the ones that don't already
have numbers assigned, sort them from earliest delivery time to
latest, and then number them sequentially, starting from wherever you
left off the last time you scanned.

nnimap-request-update-info would need to get the marks from the
server, translate message identifiers into article numbers, and
completely replace the marks in the group info, since articles are
very likely to have different numbers compared to the last time the
server was opened.  This is how nnmaildir does it, anyway.

But nnmaildir also does some optimizations - e.g., it rescans the mark
directories on disk only if the modtime has changed since the last
scan.  I don't know if IMAP allows anything analogous.  If not, this
might not be feasible for nnimape, since redoing the marks every time
you scan for new mail can slow you down quite a bit.


paul