Hi, On Wednesday 02 July 2008, Timo Sirainen wrote: > On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 15:56 +0800, Patrick Nagel wrote: > > Then I looked at how Thunderbird implements those tags when using IMAP. > > It stores them as IMAP keywords. Dovecot stores the first 26 flags in the > > filename, because it will only use one letter. Mapping between client's > > tag name and the letter is being done in dovecot-keywords files (one for > > each mailbox). If there are more IMAP keywords than 26, they will be > > stored in the dovecot.index file. > > (http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir) > > > > Now imagine we want to have 1000s (maybe 10000s) of different tags (=IMAP > > keywords) - instead of folders. Can this be recommended? > > Dovecot is currently optimized to handle a rather small number of > keywords. They're stored as a bitmask, so using 1000 different keywords > would use 125 bytes per each mail. If the keyword usage gets this high > it would be a good idea to change the implementation to store them > differently. > > You're also concentrating on only maildir format. Yes, there the limit > is 26 keywords and I don't have plans to improve it. But for example > with dbox format there is no such limit.
I see. I kind of like maildir (and thought it was "recommended"). > > What happens if the > > index file gets corrupted for some reason? (I had to delete dovecot.index > > files before...). > > v1.1 tries very hard to fix corrupted dovecot.index files and it also > ignores errors in dovecot.index.log file. Also there have been rarely > problems with those files. dovecot.index.cache file has been nearly > always the problem and it can always be safely deleted. Ok. I don't remember the details - maybe deleting dovecot.index.cache would have been enough. > > What happens if the Thunderbird profile breaks? What > > happens if we want to move on to another client? > > AFAIK Thunderbird currently supports only 5 keywords and it names them > $Lablel1 .. $Label5. Not very portable. > No, those $label1...5 are the default five tags. You can add more (although I didn't check if there is actually a (low) limit. May well be. One of our users already has something like 20 IMAP keywords in various folders/mailboxes, and she uses Thunderbird and its tags. Tags that are created by the user get a name that somehow resembles the tag's name in Thunderbird. Example: a tag named "Content Check" in Thunderbird will end up as "content_check" in dovecot-keywords. > > Are there other ways to implement 'tagging' instead of a hierarchy? > > With v1.2 it'll be possible to create virtual mailboxes. Each keyword > could have its corresponding virtual mailbox. Pretty much like in gmail. Yeah, this is the second time those virtual mailboxes would come in handy for me ;) Do you have a roadmap for 1.2? :D Patrick. -- STAR Software (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. http://www.star-group.net/ Phone: +86 (21) 3462 7688 x 826 Fax: +86 (21) 3462 7779 PGP key: https://stshacom1.star-china.net/keys/patrick_nagel.asc Fingerprint: E09A D65E 855F B334 E5C3 5386 EF23 20FC E883 A005
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