dovecot - Jan 2011 - Alternative storage vs. Self healing (losing flags?)

Hi,

We are going to set up an environment for our customers where the
storage is provided by two servers. First one stores the new emails,
second one stores all the others using Dovecot's alternative storage
feature (mailbox format is mdbox). The servers are connected via NFS.

If, for any reason, the alternative storage is not mounted, Dovecot
will see only an empty folder and due to its self-healing
functionality flags for messages stored on alternative storage will be
lost.

Is there any way to prevent regenerating indexes (and especially flags
as a side-effect) if the alternative storage seems to be completely
empty? (like a dummy file in the root of the alternative storage and
an option to enable/disable this check)

Thanks in advance,
Daniel Marczisovszky