It is not the safest, actually. Chances are, where there is Dovecot in the mix, that mail can be accesses at the same time by more than one program. Accessing via the imap server ensures concurrent yet safe access.
Dovecot, by design, always uses multiple processes for concurrent IMAP sessions. You can see this easily for yourself by connecting to your IMAP server multiple times and noting that the external listener spawns multiple imap backends to actually process the IMAP commands.
Directly calling Dovecot's imap backend from Alpine is no different from making a network connection to the Dovecot frontend and having it spawn the additional backend.
And anyway, this misses the point, because the alternative was to have both Dovecot and Alpine directly (and concurrently) touching the maildir. Even in this case, there is no chance of losing messages when using maildir format (one of its major features); but metadata like uidvalidity can't be assured. Having Dovecot be the only app that touches the maildir ensures that everything stays consistent. And being able to directly call the Dovecot backends from different frontends, including directly from your mail reader, is one of Dovecot's features.
-Jason _______________________________________________ Alpine-info mailing list [email protected] http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/alpine-info
