Mail Storage

src/lib-storage/mail-storage.h and mail-storage-private.h describes mail storage. Mail storage is mainly about being a common container for its mailboxes.

For example with mdbox, each storage has one directory where all the message bodies are written to, while the per-mailbox directories only contain index files. With other mailbox formats the mail storage doesn't do much else than allow allocating mailboxes.

Public Functions

mail_storage_purge()

Frees disk space used by expunged messages. Currently the only mailbox format that uses this is multi-dbox.

mail_storage_get_settings()

Returns mail storage settings.

mail_storage_set_callbacks()

Can be used to specify "OK" and "NO" callbacks, which are called when a long running operation wants to send a status update.

For example "OK Stale mailbox lock file detected, will override in n seconds" or "NO Mailbox is locked, will abort in n seconds".

Required Methods

Methods that mail storage backends need to implement are:

get_setting_parser_info()

Returns storage-specific settings parser information.

alloc()

Allocate memory for a storage and set its virtual functions.

create(ns)

Initialize the storage based on given namespace settings. The same storage can be used by other namespaces, but they don't call create() again.

This function typically shouldn't fail, except when storage can't handle the wanted namespace settings.

destroy()

Destroys the storage.

add_list(list)

Called every time the storage is attached to a new namespace / mailbox list.

get_list_settings(ns, set)

Used to get storage's default settings.

autodetect(ns, set)

Returns TRUE if based on the given settings it looks like this storage should we handling the namespace. This is done when mail_location doesn't explicitly specify the mailbox format.

mailbox_alloc()

Allocate memory for mailbox.

purge()

If storage supports purging.