Admin Dashboard

[stellarpower]

Hi,

So, there appear to be a few corner cases with Maddy and IMAP - documented in the bug reports, and I remember coming across some in the past and trying to narrow down whether the client or server was at fault. One of my users is somewhat concerned as unlike everyone else, they like to file everything away under a highly-nested folder structure, and then some messages to them seem to have disappeared for good, when I think this is an issue with how Maddy lists messages to the IMAP client.

That aside, it got me thinking about the idea of writing some kind of superuser-only, "pseudo-client" dashboard, to make it easier to query the databases (and the message blob stores on disc if there is a database problem) and dig out particular messages, find out what is happening. With maybe 100k-1M messages and some users who are not that technical, it becomes prohibitive trying to use the CLI, logs, or tools like ripgrep to dig around and find a particular message, especially if things have been replied to, forwarded, and all the other stuff that makes email hell to deal with in the first place.

So just wondering if anybody else has ever thought along ismilar lines, pulled any threads further to see how much work it would be, or has a similar motivating usecase (and in particular, to facilitate maddy debugging/development - so bypassing IMAP and going straight to the source). I am thinking a simple panel where I can enter a search term and go through all the messages on the system irrespective of ownership to find out where they are filed away, other references to them in the database, get their IDs, and then more easily navigate the relevant fields to see if I can reproduce problems.

Cheers

[foxcpp]

#152 describes some ideas for an RPC/HTTP interface that would make this possible.

Though there is one unfortunate bit - in current storage implementation, there is nothing to skip. maddyctl msgs list internally opens an IMAP session. This would change with #744 (https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/tree/feature/imap2) - new imap2 (IMAP4rev2) storage defines a separate management interface - https://github.com/foxcpp/maddy/blob/feature/imap2/framework/module/storage/manage.go. But it is still far from being production ready.

[stellarpower]

Ah, thank you. This rings a bell now. IMAP2 also sounds interesting, will keep an eye on it. If I end up doing a short script in the meantime I'll try to share it.