Re: OT: IMAP servers that can handle nested maildirs?
On Thursday, 30 November 2006 at 15:40:59 EST, Kyle Wheeler wrote:
> On Thursday, November 30 at 03:19 PM, quoth Sweth Chandramouli:
>>does anyone know of an IMAP server that can handle nested maildirs
>>of the sort that mutt generates
>
> Of the sort that mutt generates? Mutt doesn't automatically generate
> any particular hierarchy at all. It's a one-mailbox-at-a-time mail
> reader, and will happily use ANY hierarchy that you tell it to.
s/generates/can generate/, then. You clearly knew what I was asking, so
your being pedantic doesn't help anything.
>All you need to do is retrain your fingers away from using / to using
>. and you're set.
[snip]
>I'm afraid I don't see the real "problem" here.
Rather than assuming that there isn't one, then, how about asking for
more detail, or even assuming that the question was in fact a valid one?
There are two huge differences between directory-based hierarchies vs.
dot-separated ones, both of which present significant issues: 1) you
can't include the separator character in a folder name, and dots are far
more common in names than slashes in the folders that I'm dealing with;
and 2) using dots means all of the folders end up in the same parent
directory at the FS level, which when you're dealing with thousands of
folders means a huge performance hit for every stat on that folder.
(To preempt your next assumption: replacing the dots with another
character in the folder names is a very suboptimal solution that
requires lots of kludges; it's what I'm doing now, but my life would
be much easier if I could get away from that.)
>But, if you feel it is simply unacceptable, what you probably want to
>do is get an IMAP server that has flexible backend support. For
>example, BincIMAP uses "modules" to access it's backend (Binc calls
>them "depot styles"), and you can write one that will store your mail
>exactly as you like.
I'm not a programmer, so "write one yourself" isn't very helpful, but I
suppose I can at least now ask on the Binc lists to see if anyone has
already implemented that.
>then
>you'd have to explain to all your umpteen users (imagine doing this at
>the scale of a major university with more than 10,000 accounts)
>exactly why they can't name their folders anything they like.
FWIW, I've run mail services for just such installations, and had to
explain to users how to work around far weirder quirks than that. More
importantly, though, many pieces of software have options that wouldn't
be desirable to have enabled in most installations, but that are very
useful in others. That's why they're called options.
-- Sweth.
--
Sweth Chandramouli
sweth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - http://EthicalHomes.com/
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