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Dsync Design
============

FIXME: This describes the design for v2.0/v2.1. The v2.2 design is somewhat
different.

Two-way synchronization
-----------------------

dsync attempts to preserve all changes done by both sides of the synced
mailboxes.

Mailbox list
------------

Mailboxes have 128 bit globally unique IDs, which are used for figuring out
when two mailboxes should actually be synchronized. This solves two major
problems:

 * If mailbox has been renamed in one side, dsync finds it because its GUID
   hasn't changed.
 * If mailbox has been deleted and recreated, dsync doesn't attempt to sync it
   because it's a different mailbox.

Then there's the problem of how to correctly sync mailbox renames and
deletions. How do you know which side of the sync has the most recent name for
the mailbox? How do you know if one side had deleted mailbox, or if the other
side had created it? To solve these problems, Dovecot v2.0 created a "mailbox
log", which adds a record with mailbox GUID and timestamp whenever mailbox is
renamed or deleted. So:

 * If mailbox has different names on two sides, its "last renamed" timestamp is
   looked up from the mailbox list index. The side with the most recent
   timestamp is assumed to contain the newer name and the other side's mailbox
   is renamed to it.
    * If neither side has a "last renamed" timestamp, one side is picked. This
      shouldn't happen, except when mailbox log is deleted for some reason or
      if the renaming is done outside Dovecot.
 * If mailbox exists only on one side, the other side checks if mailbox log
   contains a delete record for its GUID. If there is one, the mailbox is
   deleted from the other side. If there's not, the mailbox is created and
   synced.
 * Subscriptions and unsubscriptions are synced in a similar way. But because
   it's possible to be subscribed to nonexistent mailboxes, mailbox log can't
   contain mailbox GUIDs for them. Instead the first 128 bits of SHA1 of
   mailbox name are used. Collisions for mailbox names are highly unlikely, but
   even if one happens, the worst that can happen is that user gets
   unsubscribed from wrong mailbox.

dsync writes timestamps to changelog using the original timestamps, so that
dsync's changes won't override changes done by user during sync.

Mailbox
-------

When saving new mails, dsync preserves all of their immutable state:

 * GUID
 * Received date
 * Save date
 * Message contents

It also attempts preserve IMAP UID. This works as long as the other side hasn't
already used the UID for another mail. If it has, dsync doesn't attempt to
preserve the UID, because an IMAP client might have already seen the UID and
cached another mail's contents for it. IMAP requires that message's contents
must never change, so UIDs can't be reused. So whenever an UID conflict
happens, dsync gives messages in both sides a new UID, because it can't know
which message the client had seen, or perhaps user used two clients and both
saw a different message. (This assumes a master/slave replication use case for
dsync.)

The mutable metadata that dsync preserves is:

 * Message flags and keywords
 * Modification sequences (modseqs)

Flags and keywords are synced based on modseqs. Whichever side has a higher
modseq for the message, its flags and keywords are synced to the other side.
Currently there's no per-flag or per-keyword synchronization, so that if one
side had added \Seen flag and other side had added \Answered flag, one of them
would be dropped.

Finding what to sync
--------------------

dsync can run in full mode or fast mode. Full mode means it goes through all
messages in all mailboxes, making sure everything is fully synchronized. In
fast mode it relies on uidvalidity, uid-next and highest-modseq values to find
out changes. If any of the values changed, the mailbox is included in sync.

FIXME: A superfast mode should still be implemented, where once a mailbox is
selected for syncing, it should sync only mails whose modseq is higher than a
given one. This would improve performance and network traffic with large
mailboxes.

Copy optimizations
------------------

Before dsync actually starts syncing anything, it first fetched a list of all
to-be-synced messages and adds them to a GUID -> message hash table. Whenever
dsync needs to sync a new message to the other side, it first checks if the
message's GUID already exists on the other side. If it does, it starts a
message copy operation instead of a full save. It's possible that this copy
operation fails if the message just gets expunged from the other side, so there
needs to be fallback handling for this. If the message exists in multiple
mailboxes, a copy from the next mailbox is attempted. If all of them fail,
dsync fallbacks to saving the message.

FIXME: This optimization currently works only in full sync mode. If this were
to work in fast sync mode, the full mailbox list would have to be looked up
from local side. And this would slow it down..

(This file was created from the wiki on 2019-06-19 12:42)