procmail
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Re: maildirs

1999-11-23 22:54:12
On Tue, Nov 23, 1999 at 02:30:57PM -0600, Philip Guenther wrote:
The format is
      an underbar

This seems frivolous.  If you're interested in shorter filenames, why
add arbitrary characters to it?

      the pid, base64 encoded left to right
      one of the set .,+:%@

What determines which one of these are used?  IMHO, unless there is a
reason to add more bits of data here, this should be a period.

      the time, base64 encoded left to right

Just out of curiosity, was there a reason for putting pid before time in
the file name format (qmail does time before pid).

      a period
      the hostname, or at least the beginning of it

I'll note that the qmail maildir manpage suffers from the defect of
either being descriptive and not prescriptive, or over specifying: it
describes how that original qmail implementation works, but does not
make on what matters _all_ implementations must match.

I have always read that particular man page, especially the "HOW A
MESSAGE IS DELIVERED" section as a concise prescription of how to
deliver.  Having said this, as long as the tmp->new procedure is
followed on delivery, the precise naming of the files is fairly
irrelevant (note the below exception).

According to the
"HOW A MESSAGE IS READ" section, programs which read messages in maildir
folders treat the actual filename as an opaque blob, so the above method
of picking a unique filename should work fine.

True, except that anything following a ":" is treated as "info", to be
interpreted by the reader as flags.  So, in the above format
description, some file names generated by procmail will cause readers to
mishandle the flags, since procmail generates some names with ':' in
them.  Readers use these flags to mark a message as read/old/replied/etc
rather than modifying the contents of the message.
-- 
Bruce Guenter <bruceg(_at_)em(_dot_)ca>                       
http://em.ca/~bruceg/

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