dovecot - Jan 2013 - dovecot.index is missing

Dear All,

I have noticed that dovecot.index is not generated straight away if you have
just a few emails in the mailbox. Instead of that dovecot.index.log is modified
and accessed by clients.

Only if the number of email reaches some level then it creates dovecot.index in
user mailboxes.

Can somebody please tell me when (in my understanding of the process) the index
log file drops all data into the mail index file. What does trigger that ?
Sorry I couldn't find any info on that in the wiki.

Best Regards,
Alexandr Sabitov

On 1/29/2013 1:37 AM, Alexandr Sabitov wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I have noticed that dovecot.index is not generated straight away if you
have just a few emails in the mailbox. Instead of that dovecot.index.log is
modified and accessed by clients.
> 
> Only if the number of email reaches some level then it creates
dovecot.index in user mailboxes.
> 
> Can somebody please tell me when (in my understanding of the process) the
index log file drops all data into the mail index file. What does trigger that ?
> Sorry I couldn't find any info on that in the wiki.
Dovecot is behaving here as designed.   You haven't found the technical
answer because there is no configurable variable for this behavior--it's
hard coded.  Thus it is not documented.

The layman's explanation is this:  up to a certain amount of mail it is
more expensive to create the index than to simply read the mail.  Beyond
that point indexing has benefit.  To understand how that decision is
made requires reading the source, and understanding it.

-- 
Stan