Local access to IMAP mailboxes

Victor Sudakov
Thu, 27 Sep 2018 15:04:42 -0000

Joseph Tam 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.

Great, thank you!

>
> 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.

What passwordless access methods does Dovecot support? I'm more or
less experienced with GSSAPI but for the present I would not like to
set up a KDC somewhere on a box exposed to the Internet.

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

My mail goes through procmail, so Dovecot will not be the only one to
touch the mboxes anyway.

--
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
2:5005/49 at fidonet http://vas.tomsk.ru/