On Tue, 2013-01-29 at 03:37 -0600, Stan Hoeppner wrote: > On 1/29/2013 1:37 AM, Alexandr Sabitov wrote: > > Dear All, > > > > I have noticed that dovecot.index is not generated straight away if you > > have just a few emails in the mailbox. Instead of that dovecot.index.log is > > modified and accessed by clients. > > > > Only if the number of email reaches some level then it creates > > dovecot.index in user mailboxes. > > > > Can somebody please tell me when (in my understanding of the process) the > > index log file drops all data into the mail index file. What does trigger > > that ? > > Sorry I couldn't find any info on that in the wiki. > > Dovecot is behaving here as designed. You haven't found the technical > answer because there is no configurable variable for this behavior--it's > hard coded. Thus it is not documented. > > The layman's explanation is this: up to a certain amount of mail it is > more expensive to create the index than to simply read the mail. Beyond > that point indexing has benefit. To understand how that decision is > made requires reading the source, and understanding it.
The index still exists. It's just that for new mailboxes the dovecot.index.log file contains everything that is necessary to create a dovecot.index file, and Dovecot just hasn't gotten around to actually creating it. If a mailbox shrinks enough, the dovecot.index file could in theory be deleted as well (and maybe in future Dovecot version it will). So dovecot.index is just a snapshot that gets updated every once in a while. http://wiki2.dovecot.org/IndexFiles and http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Design/Indexes has some more details, although they don't seem to talk about this exact thing.
