[Dovecot] Another numptie question - making maildirs for shared mailboxes.

[Stroller]

Hi there,

Sorry to have so much trouble with my Dovecot setup & to ask so many 
questions, but I'm having some problems with shared folders. I've read 
the thread at 
<http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2005-January/006079.html> and 
added the following lines to /etc/dovecot.conf:

	namespace private {
	   separator = /
	   prefix =
	   inbox = yes
	}
	
	namespace public {
	  separator = /
	  prefix = General/
	  location = maildir:/tmp/dovecot-test/
	  inbox = no
	  hidden = no
	}

So I create a directory /tmp/dovecot-test/ and an empty file 
/tmp/dovecot-test/dovecot-shared with liberal (777 & 666 respectively) 
permissions and then try to subscribe to the "General" folder in 
Outlook - I get a "failed to subscribe to the folder. The server 
responded `the mailbox doesn't exist: General`" error message, but cur, 
new & tmp are created in /tmp/dovecot-test. These subfolders are owned 
by the user that attempted to subscribe & have 700 permissions; 
chmod'ing them 777 makes no difference.

Since "default_mail_env = maildir:%h/.maildir" in dovecot.conf I make a 
directory /tmp/dovecot-test/.maildir also containing cur, new, tmp & 
dovecot-shared. When I select "IMAP folders" in Outlook I am still 
unable to subscribe to "General" but am now able to subscribe to 
"General/maildir". The subscribed folder is shown in Outlook underneath 
the users' Inbox as a sub-folder of general, screenshot at 
<http://linux.stroller.uk.eu.org/DovecotSharedFolders.png> - see how I 
can't subscribe to "General" alone, but it is "brought in" by 
subscribing to "General/maildir"? If I try to copy a test message into 
General then, after a delay of a minute or so, I get "Can't move the 
items - this IMAP command could not be sent to the server before the 
connect was terminated"; if I try to copy the test message into 
General/maildir then I immediately get "Can't copy the items. The 
server responded: `Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for 
more information [2005-12-20 12:05:40]".

I've tried tinkering with other directory structures under 
/tmp/dovecot-test/ with no success - can anyone suggest what I'm doing 
wrong, please?

It's quite important to me that the "General" folder is a fairly 
high-level one - only one additional folder icon should show up for the 
users' shared mail. At one point I managed to create a folder 
General/General, but that's undesirable - the users wouldn't understand 
the concept of having a folder showing in Outlook that they can't write 
to, or which is only used as a container for another folder. (In any 
case, I believe I was still unable to write to it).

I was about to say, "I know I could resolve this with the use of a 
symlink-type shared folder, but that's undesirable because I'd have to 
manually add the symlink for each user that's added to the system", but 
writing this it occurs to me that I could resolve that by adding the 
symlink to the the etc/skel/. Nevertheless, I see the namespaces 
approach as more elegant, as it allows for different user groups having 
different shared folders.

I'd appreciate any advice - I suspect I'm just getting the directory 
hierarchies wrong, or the syntax of dovecot.conf wrong AGAIN! If anyone 
with a working shared folders setup could provide a copy of the 
appropriate section of dovecot.conf & a listing of the appropriate 
directories then I'd be EXTREMELY grateful.

Stroller.