Hello devs,

I switch threads because I agree with the removal of the FS based mailqueue
but still find the maildir removal to be a bit more difficult.

Quoting from the other thread at
https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg70960.html

What protocols are supported by the 2.3 release line? As far as I am
> aware of, it mostly is POP3, and - again to my own experience - POP3
> user do not tend to have a large mailbox (as POP3 causes it to be read
> again and again and over again), I doubt that we are speaking of the
> same volumetry than for instance an IMAP server migration.
>

Undoubtedly I don't know james code as well as you do but while gary
mentioned a 2.3 migration, it doesn't really matter ...
The maildir implementation currently exists in james 3.x[1], it is listed
as an official mailbox implementation and not marked deprecated [2]
Therefore it would be legitimate for users to use it with James 3 and
dropping it from 3.7 without a deprecation period sounds a bit cavalier to
me.

Also maildir is a fairly standard mailbox format, support for it allows for
migration from other software to james

Now you state:

> With such a high number of critical issues that no one dare fixing
>

I may be mistaken as I didn't investigate in details but it sounds like
most of the issues stem from a lack of sanitizing in FS paths. You mention
in JAMES-3646[3] that you are going to fix the sieve and FileRepositories.
Considering the practices in the james codebase most of the sanitizing code
is going to end up in a shared service. Once that's in place it would be
easier to fix a few of the maildir bugs using this code and it could become
a nice first contrib no ?

On a side note MAILBOX-183[4] "readUidFile is taking too much time for
large uid file and blocks other threads" is open but marked as a duplicate
of a closed bug ... not sure if it is still applicable.

Jean

[1] https://github.com/apache/james-project/tree/master/mailbox/maildir
[2] https://github.com/apache/james-project/blob/master/mailbox/README.md
[3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/JAMES-3646
[4] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MAILBOX-183

On Mon, Sep 6, 2021 at 5:47 AM Rene Cordier <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I think you are making good points. It's probably better to focus on
> what works well if it's enough of an alternative to maildir (like
> embedded JPA as you mentionned), with little resources we have.
>
> +1 !
>
> Rene.
>
> On 05/09/2021 19:58, [email protected] wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > While reviewing overall file path sanitizing (JAMES-3646) I found
> > maildir to incorrectly sanitize some file path.
> >
> > Playing around, I discovered some magic names that leads to maildir
> > errors namely MAILBOX-406, and a NPE with an empty mailbox (MAILBOX-407).
> >
> > Moreover, over time the list of maildir defects keeps on growing:
> >
> >   - MAILBOX-389 Mailbox rename fails with Maildir
> >   - MAILBOX-393 mailboxId support for mailDir is partial
> >
> > Now looking on the bug tracker I notice people encounter (and nobody
> > answers):
> >
> >   - MAILBOX-390 Unexpected error accessing mailbox
> >   - MAILBOX-344 Maildir do not support MODSEQ search
> >   - MAILBOX-299 Maildir should fail gracefully when mailbox name is too
> long
> >   - MAILBOX-241 Maildir implementation does not check namespace on
> existance
> >   - MAILBOX-183 readUidFile is taking too much time for large uid file
> > and blocks other threads
> >   - JAMES-3612 Cryptic errors upon bad permissions
> >   - JAMES-1515 Maildirstorage backend crashes with Exception due to
> > "wrong" filename
> >
> > With such a high number of critical issues that no one dare fixing, it
> > sounds reasonable to me to state that maildir implementation do not
> > match quality standards that one would expect from an Apache project.
> >
> > Other mail servers do have great maildir implenentation, which
> > mistakenly lead users to think the maildir implementation is a quality
> > one, which is very far from the truth.
> >
> > Moreover, maildir code is outdated,  hard to work with, and pulls us
> > back in many way. Given the currently small amount of contributors, we
> > do not have time and resources to give it the love it deserves.
> >
> > Also, alternatives exist: embedded JPA database do also run well in
> > single instance mode, and could server as a maildir replacement. People
> > could use utilities like imapsync to plan their migration.
> >
> > As such, I propose myself to retire maildir and remove related code from
> > the repository.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Benoit
> >
> >
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