From what i have seen, you're absolutely correct. It looks like the use of ctime or mtime depends on wether you want the message removed x days after it was moved to say the trash folder (ctime) or will be removed x days after it originally arrived in the inbox (mtime). My personal opinion is currently that i would like it removed x days after it was placed in a certain folder, hence i use ctime.
Rody Op woensdag 13 februari 2008 00:43, schreef Bill Cole: > At 10:45 PM +0100 2/12/08, Rody imposed structure on a stream of > > electrons, yielding: > >The opinions vary slightly when it comes to using mtime or ctime. I've > > chosen ctime because i believe using mtime will not garantee that there > > aren't any mails left which are actually older than 30 days. I believe > > there are cases where mtime may get changed, where ctime will not. Also, > > ctime starts counting from the moment the mail gets dropped in a certain > > mailbox. > > Yes, but you may also care that ctime is reset when a client has > Dovecot move a message from one subfolder to another within a > Maildir. I'm not sure why Dovecot does it, but a look at the messages > in the non-INBOX parts of my Maildir reveals that the ctime is always > later than the mtime, and the contents (Received headers) makes it > clear that Dovecot sets the mtime of messages to the original mtime > (i.e. original delivery time) when copying them. > > Hopefully Timo will speak up on this, but I have a vague recollection > of him saying that Dovecot never modifies message contents as a > matter of principle, and it seems to me that the design of Maildir > assumes that the mailstore server follows that principle rigorously. > That should make mtime quite static for an individual file, and it > looks to me like Dovecot even makes an effort to preserve the > delivery time of a message by replicating the mtime from the original > file to the new one when copying a message between subfolders.
