On Thu, 2008-01-31 at 10:01 +0000, Daniel Watts wrote: > Hi Timo, > > On Jan 29, 2008, at 6:03 PM, Daniel Watts wrote: > > > >> Is there not a more efficient way to do this? If Dovecot knows the > >> whole folder is being deleted (ie a Trash purge), could it do > >> something clever with the filesystem to just remove the whole folder? > > > > If you use IMAP DELETE command, it renames the directory to > > ..DOVECOT-TRASH (or something like it) and only after that it starts > > unlinking the files. It wouldn't be too difficult to have this return > > success immediately and then keep deleting the files on the > > background. I'm not sure if this is worth the trouble though. It would > > also be possible to do this as a plugin. > Something like that would be great. Would this actually then avoid the > locking problem described below?
Well, kind of, because the entire mailbox is deleted it can't even be opened by another session :) Although it would be possible to create it back immediately after deletion, but there's a small window during which it's possible that the mailbox selection fails. > IMHO this benefit is worth the effort. =) There are two separate things here: 1) Making DELETE command work on background. This would require the user to specifically delete + create back the mailbox and not just expunge all messages. This wouldn't be too difficult. 2) Optimize expunging all messages by renaming Maildir/cur under Maildir/tmp/, mkdir Maildir/cur back and then start deleting Maildir/tmp/cur on background. This has a race condition between rename() + mkdir(), so I don't want to ever do this by default. Anyway I'm not going to implement either one anytime soon, but feel free to write a plugin. :)
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