dovecot - Mar 2009 - Slightly OT : Maildir format (silly) questions

Hello,

I was asking what was the motivation for not having the envelope From in the
Maildir format, as defined in the qmail spec :

"The message is delivered without an extra UUCP-
 style From_ line, without any >From quoting, and without an
 extra blank line at the end."

which may sound silly since we lose an important piece of information.

Same question about the motivation in Courrier (Maildir++)  for emulating a
hierarchy for subfolders (like in .folder.subfolder.subsubfolder) instead of
(note : I know about layout=FS, I'm not talking about that) implementing a
real
filesystem hierarchy.

I understand dovecot kept those for compatibility reasons but I'd like to
know
what was the authors of thoses specs thinking when deciding this.

Thanks

-- 
Thomas Hummel 	    | Institut Pasteur
<hummel at pasteur.fr> | P?le informatique - syst?mes et r?seau

Thomas Hummel wrote:
> I was asking what was the motivation for not having the envelope From in
the
> Maildir format, as defined in the qmail spec :
> 
> "The message is delivered without an extra UUCP-
>  style From_ line, without any >From quoting, and without an
>  extra blank line at the end."
> 
> which may sound silly since we lose an important piece of information.
You can always add an extra header that contains what you want. (Exim's 
default for that is Return-path:). The From_ line in mbox is used as a 
message delimiter. AFAIK it's not even treated like a header, so it's 
not sent to the (POP3/IMAP-)MUA.
> Same question about the motivation in Courrier (Maildir++)  for emulating a
> hierarchy for subfolders (like in .folder.subfolder.subsubfolder) instead
of
> (note : I know about layout=FS, I'm not talking about that)
implementing a real
> filesystem hierarchy.
Don't know about that, probably better to ask Sam Varshavchik on the 
Courier list.
One reason probably is because it's easier to get a complete folder list 
by scanning a single folder than recursively scanning all folders.
The starting dot '.' is clear, I guess, otherwise you couldn't have 
folders named cur, new and tmp.

On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 10:47 +0100, Thomas Hummel wrote:
> Same question about the motivation in Courrier (Maildir++)  for emulating a
> hierarchy for subfolders (like in .folder.subfolder.subsubfolder) instead
of
> (note : I know about layout=FS, I'm not talking about that)
implementing a real
> filesystem hierarchy.
This is most likely because of Maildir++ quota. So for example if you
tell MDA to deliver mail to /foo/bar, should it use /foo/bar/maildirsize
or /foo/maildirsize file? It's especially problematic if the file
doesn't already exist. The solution was to have a "maildirfolder"
file,
and if it exists it uses the parent directory's maildirsize file. This
wouldn't work at least as easily if it had to go multiple parent dirs
up.

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On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 11:23:44AM -0400, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> This is most likely because of Maildir++ quota. So for example if you
> tell MDA to deliver mail to /foo/bar, should it use /foo/bar/maildirsize
> or /foo/maildirsize file? It's especially problematic if the file
> doesn't already exist. 
In your example (sorry I haven't had to use quota), you mean that both /foo
et
/foo/bar would have a quota ?

-- 
Thomas Hummel 	    | Institut Pasteur
<hummel at pasteur.fr> | P?le informatique - syst?mes et r?seau

Thomas Hummel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was asking what was the motivation for not having the envelope From in
the
> Maildir format, as defined in the qmail spec :
> 
> "The message is delivered without an extra UUCP-
>  style From_ line, without any >From quoting, and without an
>  extra blank line at the end."
> 
> which may sound silly since we lose an important piece of information.
People who believe by hart "Maildirs do not require locking." and 
"Maildir is a faster and more efficient way to store mail." could do 
plenty of really strange things ;)


-- 
Dmitry Samersoff
dms at samersoff.net, http://devnull.samersoff.net
* There will come soft rains ...