Local access to IMAP mailboxes

Joseph Tam
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 21:57:57 -0000

On Wed, 26 Sep 2018, Victor Sudakov wrote:

> However, I often read and modify the mailboxes locally with mutt (e.g.
> append and delete mails).
>
> Should I expect any problems wit Dovecot indexes etc? What if I even
> do "rm ~/Mail/some/mailbox", will Dovecot be mad at me?

I do it all the time.  Works fine.

As others have written, you may see performance degradation as Dovecot
will have to rebuild indices, but if you have small mailboxes, this won't
be too bad.  The only reason I use direct file access rather than IMAP
is that I'm too lazy to work out a passwordless access method.  If this
doesn't bother you or you can configure this (e.g. Kerberos, keyring,
etc.), IMAP access is preferable since you won't pull the indices out
from Dovecot's feet.

You'll also get a lot of innocuous griping in the log files about
UIDVALIDITY and mailbox corruption, but they can be safely ignored.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>