A bit too much misinformation here so I'll have to reply :) On 3.5.2010, at 7.51, Mark Crispin wrote:
> The main issue is if any other mail reading program is consuming the mbox. > If Dovecot is the only consumer you will be OK. But if you have other > consumers (including Pine, Alpine, elm, /usr/ucb/mail, UW IMAP, etc.) > accessing the mbox while Dovecot is doing its thing there may be a > problem. Dovecot allows non-Dovecot programs to access mbox files. As long as they use compatible read/write locks, there aren't any corruption problems. The only potential problem is that flag changes and such may not be noticed immediately, but there are also settings to make Dovecot read/write the mbox state more aggressively (so worse performance). But the default behavior is actually pretty much the same as uw-imap's. > I wasn't aware of Dovecot supporting mix. As far as I know, Dovecot only > supports maildir (its preferred format) and mbox. There's a mix-inspired upcoming new mailbox format "mdbox" (or multi-dbox, also dbox=single-dbox which uses compatible mail files, but only single mail/file). > Maildir, in turn, does extra stuff to be NFS-safe at the cost of not being > at all ameniable for IMAP. Dovecot actually implements a modified version > of maildir which is not NFS-safe... Many people are using Dovecot with NFS, but you're right, it's not entirely safe because I assumed I could flush NFS caches as necessary, but that didn't turn out to work as well as I expected. > I think that you may have mistaken what Dovecot's multi-threading does. There is no multi-threading in Dovecot! Multiple processes, sure, but it's single-threaded everywhere. (But there is initial support for handling multiple client connections in a single process (in a single thread).) > The multi-threading allows multiple simutaneous read/write access to an > mbox format mailbox, as long as Dovecot is the only consumer of the mbox > file (and you don't want to violate that assumption). It does this by > exchanging semaphores between the threads, which run in the same process; > otherwise there are no such semaphore with mbox format. IPC is done only via filesystem._______________________________________________ Imap-uw mailing list [email protected] http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/imap-uw
