Mailbox

src/lib-storage/mail-storage.h and mail-storage-private.h describes mailbox API, among others. Mailbox life cycle often goes like:

• mailbox_alloc() allocates memory for the mailbox and initializes some internal settings, but doesn’t actually try to open it.

• mailbox_open() opens the mailbox. Instead of opening a mailbox, you can also create it with mailbox_create().

  • If you’re immediately syncing the mailbox, you don’t need to open it, because it’s done implicitly. This reduces your code and error handling a bit.

• mailbox_close() closes the mailbox, so that it needs to be opened again if it’s wanted to be accessed. This is rarely needed.

• mailbox_free() closes and frees the mailbox.

There are a lot of functions to deal with mailboxes. The most important ones are:

• mailbox_get_status() to get a summary of mailbox, such as number of messages in it.

• mailbox_get_metadata() to various kinds of metadata of a mailbox, such as the sum of the message sizes inside the mailbox.

• Syncing: mailbox_sync_*() to synchronize changes from the backend to memory.

• Transactions: mailbox_transaction_*() for transaction handling. All message reads and writes are done in a transaction.

• Searching: mailbox_search_*() is used for searching messages. Even simple operations like “get all messages” go through this API by creating a “search all” query.

• Saving: mailbox_save_*() and mailbox_copy() is used for saving/copying new messages to mailbox.