Mailbox Transactions
Before you can read any mails or do any changes to mails, you need to create a transaction with mailbox_transaction_begin(). It has a few flags:
MAILBOX_TRANSACTION_FLAG_HIDE: Mark the changes in a way that when later syncing the mailbox in this session, mailbox_sync_next() won't return sync records for the changes done by this transaction. This is primarily meant for flag and keyword changes, you can't hide expunges. For example IMAP's STORE FLAGS.SILENT command is implemented by setting this flag for the transaction.
MAILBOX_TRANSACTION_FLAG_EXTERNAL: Changes done by this transaction should be marked as external changes. Internal changes can be thought of as "change requests" that syncing later finishes, while external changes are done immediately and syncing ignores them. Normally you would use this flag when you want to save or copy messages, nothing else.
MAILBOX_TRANSACTION_FLAG_ASSIGN_UIDS: Require assigning UIDs to saved/copied messages immediately. Normally this is done only when it's easy (maildir: if dovecot-uidlist can be locked without waiting, mbox: if mbox is already fully synced).
MAILBOX_TRANSACTION_FLAG_REFRESH: Do a quick index refresh, so any recent flag/modseq changes done by other Dovecot sessions will be visible. You shouldn't usually need this, because usually you should have recently done a mailbox sync.
Changes for a transaction are kept in memory until the transaction is committed. If you want to cancel the changes, you can call mailbox_transaction_rollback(). Transaction can be commited with mailbox_transaction_commit(). If you want to know a bit more about the results of the transaction, use mailbox_transaction_commit_get_changes() instead. It returns a change structure:
- uid_validity: UIDVALIDITY used by returned UIDs
- saved_uids: UIDs assigned to saved/copied mails. Typically they're in an ascending order, unless you explicitly requested some specific UIDs for mails while saving them (e.g. dsync does this).
ignored_uid_changes: Number of UIDs that couldn't be changed by mail_update_uid() calls, because the UIDs were less than next_uid's value.
ignored_modseq_changes: Number of modseqs that couldn't be changed by mail_update_modseq() calls, because they would have lowered the modseq.
Once you're done with reading the change structure, be sure to free the memory used by it with pool_unref(&changes->pool).
mailbox_transaction_set_max_modseq() can be used to implement atomic conditional flag changes. If message's modseq is higher than the given max_modseq while transaction is being committed, the change isn't done and the message's sequence number is added to the given array.