At 11:16 PM Thursday 4/1/99, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
>I have just converted all of our 8000+ users to maildir format. We
>don't use qmail but we do use maildir folders using our own MDA.
>The mail is delivered in /var/spool/mail/username/
>Now, with a bit of thinking I found out that this isn't nessecary at
>all. The modification time on the tmp/ directory indicates when a new
>message was last delivered, since that always goes through tmp/.
>The access time on the new/ directory (set by readdir()) indicates when
>a mail program last checked the maildir mbox. So, a complete scan
>of new/ and cur/ stat()ing all files isn't nessecary at all.
>
>However, since quite a few existing programs take the scanning approach,
>they change the access-time on the new/ directory making the above described
>approach invalid.
But mtime and atime are different right?
>Would it be possible to define the method I decribed above as "the"
>method to check for new mail (for shells, status bars etc) and to also
>define that programs that actually scan cur/ and new/ should use utime()
>to reset the access time on those directories after the scan?
Probably better not to have scanners invoking additional I/O if they can
avoid it (and they may not have +w access).
Making it "the" method would be interesting. If you are using your own MDA,
then it's pretty hard to argue why you don't just touch a .new file or some
such. And of course for those people who need it with mail-local, a
| touch .new
in a .qmail works just fine.
Not saying that you haven't a good idea, just that there are ways of
achieving this already for those people who need it and (speculation) with
declining direct shell access vs POP/IMAP. adding this requirement certainly
doesn't fall into the category of everyone needing it.
>[If so I could contact the authors of maildir-aware applications to
> make sure they use that method]
Good idea.
Regards.
