looking for Cyrus mail format documentation

[Mark Keasling]

Hi,

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003 05:57:53 -0600, Phil Howard <phil-info-cyrus at ipal.net> wrote...
> One thing I was thinking of would be a hack to make one server always use
> only odd UIDs, and the other always use only even UIDs, and to do catchups
> while they are reachable with each other.  But this is getting into hacking
> code I know nothing about, yet.  Maybe a later time.

Using odd and even UIDs and merging would be a novel solution.  However,
it may be `too' novel.  There is an IMAP requirement that doesn't permit
merging (reordering).  Messages can only be appended to the end of the
mailbox because new messages must get a UID >= UIDNEXT.  The situation
is never permitted to occur where the client opens a mailbox which has
UIDs 1,3,5 and then at some time later it has UIDs 1,2,3,4,5 with out a
change to UIDVALIDITY.  When UIDVALIDITY changes (which should be larger
than before), the client knows that what it knows about UIDs is now useless.

> around.  Mail from the internet would be delivered on the outside server
> and replicated in.  Mail from the intranet would be delivered on the inside
> server and replicated out.

It could be left at this point; but, I'm sure people would want mail in the
same order at both places and changes to be reflected in both places...

> My original design was for a Maildir based mailstore, and would work at the
> file replication level (somewhat like rsync, but with some differences to
> handle it two-ways).

It sounds like you may need to design a distributed mailstore that will
satisfy both your requirements and those of IMAP and then implement a
server around that mailstore.

Regards,
Mark Keasling <mark at air.co.jp>