[dovecot] Re: shared folders?

[Andreas Aardal Hanssen]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Moe Wibble wrote:
>I must admit that I have never really understood (and only very briefly
>browsed over) the idea of imap namespaces. With the little bit I know I'm
>basically considering them mainly as a convenience for a person willing to
>implement an imap server because they make it easier to have the imapd emulate
>"virtual" folders to the client.
>But why not just let the user arrange his folder hierarchy the way he likes
>when what we are dealing with actually is a folder anyways?
>I don't see the connection to shared folders.
>And I don't see a reason why shared folders should be separated in a
>different namespace?

The reason for this comes naturally from one of the main applications of
shared folders, which is companies that share announcement and news
folders across their employees. One shared folder may be called "finance",
another may be "news".

Now, I personally have a mailbox called "news" which is a superior to
"CNN.com", "Freshmeat.net" and so on. So I can't subscribe to the shared
folder "news" unless it's in a different namespace. The namespace name
usually starts with a character that is disallowed in regular mailboxes.  

So perhaps the company's namespace is "#thecompany". Now you can subscribe
to two mailboxes whose names are both "news", one is just "news" or within
some personal namespace "#personal/news", and one is "#thecompany/news".

Andy

-- 
Andreas Aardal Hanssen
http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg