dovecot - Feb 2010 - revision control on maildir possible?

Hi,

I was wondering if it is possible to put a dovecot managed maildir under a vcs
like system, for example git or bzr. I'd like to have a seamless history of
all mail going in and out of my mailboxes, so a vcs like system seams a good
choice for me. I'm not quite sure however if that would cause any problems
to dovecot and what the best way of handling commits would be.

If anyone on the list got any pointers regarding this, it would be much
apprechiated.

Best regards,
Markus
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On Sunday 14 February 2010 11:26:17 Markus Beyer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering if it is possible to put a dovecot managed maildir under a
>  vcs like system, for example git or bzr. I'd like to have a seamless
>  history of all mail going in and out of my mailboxes, so a vcs like system
>  seams a good choice for me. I'm not quite sure however if that would
cause
>  any problems to dovecot and what the best way of handling commits would
>  be.
> 
> If anyone on the list got any pointers regarding this, it would be much
>  apprechiated.
If thats not a secret, what is the reason why you can't be sure of things
with
just attaching a trusted timestamp header for each mail? Someone could edit or 
delete those mails? Well, if you'd be using a LDA like maildrop, you could 
easily just call some bash script or direct command to make a new commit as 
your VCS provide... After each newly arrived message. (I don't know about 
moved / deleted messages hooks!) But... That is quite a heavyweight solution. 
Can there be any other reason to use it than because someone could delete or 
change a mail without your knowledge?
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On Sun, 14 Feb 2010, Markus Beyer wrote:
> I was wondering if it is possible to put a dovecot managed maildir under 
> a vcs like system, for example git or bzr. I'd like to have a seamless 
> history of all mail going in and out of my mailboxes, so a vcs like 
> system seams a good choice for me. I'm not quite sure however if that 
> would cause any problems to dovecot and what the best way of handling 
> commits would be.
Hmm,

+ avoid to create ".*" files in your Maildir base directory. I
don't know
bzr, but IMHO git creates a single .git directory, hence, you should 
create the repo at the same level as the Maildir, e.g.:

.git/
Maildir/
Maildir/new
Maildir/cur
Maildir/tmp

Subversion won't work, because it creates a .SVN directory in each 
versioned directory. They will be misunderstood as mailbox.

+ avoid to version the index files, they are binary anyway.

+ avoid the content of all tmp/ dirs.

+ Maybe: instead of to blacklist files, use a whitelist:
anything in cur/ and new/, subscriptions, maildirfolder, dovecot-uidlist, 
dovecot-keywords,& others like .dovecot-shared, .dovecot-acl, sieve/ ...

+ message files are renamed, when their status or keywords / labels / tags 
change, either you live with these duplicates or you need to keep track of 
the filename changes by looking at the filename stem (up to, but not 
including the colon); some VCSs can keep track of filename changes.
The same applies when messages are "seen" and moved from new/ to cur/.

+ when you move/copy messages around, you could track them by their 
message id, in order to avoid duplicates.

+ You can use a script to wrap deliver to trigger add/remove for the 
Maildir. But I think to schedule the sync would be better.

===
IMHO, if you want to avoid duplicates, a VCS does not seem to fit. Or you 
could delay the checkin for, say, one day, one could argue that then the 
messages are read, spooled in the "final" mailbox, tagged a.s.o.

Regards,

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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