[Alpine-info] Maildir folder-collection

[jason-alpine-info at shalott.net]

> It is not the safest, actually. Chances are, where there is Dovecot in 

> the mix, that mail can be accesses at the same time by more than one 

> program. Accessing via the imap server ensures concurrent yet safe 

> access.


Dovecot, by design, always uses multiple processes for concurrent IMAP 
sessions.  You can see this easily for yourself by connecting to your IMAP 
server multiple times and noting that the external listener spawns 
multiple imap backends to actually process the IMAP commands.

Directly calling Dovecot's imap backend from Alpine is no different from 
making a network connection to the Dovecot frontend and having it spawn 
the additional backend.

And anyway, this misses the point, because the alternative was to have 
both Dovecot and Alpine directly (and concurrently) touching the maildir. 
Even in this case, there is no chance of losing messages when using 
maildir format (one of its major features); but metadata like uidvalidity 
can't be assured.  Having Dovecot be the only app that touches the maildir 
ensures that everything stays consistent.  And being able to directly call 
the Dovecot backends from different frontends, including directly from 
your mail reader, is one of Dovecot's features.


  -Jason