Kirill Miazine wrote:
* Don Russell [2007-07-16 10:23]:
Can we delete maildir files directly from the file system?
[...]
And if we cannot delete files with the 'rm' command, whats the
best/proper way to delete these older files.
My opinion has always been that the data structure should not be
replied upon.... if you want to do things with your mail items, then
use the APIs/imap commands to do it. That protects you from any
internal stuff you didn't know about, or changed from one server to
another, or one version to another.
Maildir is a sort of a standard with some sort of an API, isn't it? The
"standard" (<http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html>) says following:
An MUA can read and delete messages while new mail is being
delivered: each message is stored in a separate file with a
unique name, so it isn't affected by operations on other messages.
True, but why tie my script to one format, when it can work equally well
with *any* format supported by the IMAP server? :-) If new and improved
formats develop, I don't have to rewrite my scripts. :-)
For example, I have the beginnings of a script to handle my "mail
retention policies". It connects to Dovecot/imap to get the list of
mail for specific folders, then uses the imap delete (or copy) API to
delete mail older than n days, or to keep only the most recent n
messages. That sort of thing.
With Maildir it's trivial to do this sort of things with a shell script.
Yes, I suppose it is. :-) However, in my case (and I wrote the script
for my own use) my mail is in mbox format. Eventually I want to convert
it to maildir or something else (dbox?) and since my script uses the
IMAP interface, I won't have to change anything, the IMAP server does
all the heavy lifting. :-)
The benefit is my script then doesn't care how Dovecot (or whichever
server) stores things.... and if a mailbox changes from mbox to
maildir format, or similar change.. no worries... my script just
doesn't care... it always uses the APIs to manipulate mail.
Safe, but admittedly not as fast. I favor reliability over speed in
these sorts of cases. :-)
That's a valid point. It's much easier to shoot one's own leg pretty
ugly, when deleting/renaming/whatevert the files in the Maildir
directly. IMAP SEARCH is IMHO a bit easier to understand than find(1).
Best wishes,
Kirill
Cheers :-)
