[Dovecot] Public folders using NAMESPACE

[Joakim Ryden]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 03:48 -0700, Joakim Ryden wrote:
>> With this, "Public Folders" shows up (testing with Thunderbird) but
>> not as an
>> italic special folder (does that make sense?) as it does on all other
>> accounts I
>> have on other servers which support public folders. 
> 
> I think I heard that Thunderbird uses IMAP ACL extension to check if
> some mailbox is shared or not. Dovecot doesn't support IMAP ACL
> extension yet. Or it might be something else too I suppose.

I think you're absolutely right.

>> which also shows up nicely, I can copy email in there and subscribe
>> and
>> unsubsribe to this subfolder, but clicking on "Public Folders" gives:
>> Mailbox
>> doesn't exist: Public Folders. which I'm sure is because I've missed
>> or
>> misunderstood something :)  Any ideas?
> 
> Well, unfortunately that doesn't work. Dovecot doesn't currently support
> subscribing to namespace prefixes, only to mailboxes inside the
> namespace. You might be able to kludge around that by making the
> subscription go to the private namespace. Either manually updating the
> subscriptions file, or removing this code from
> src/imap/cmd-subscriptions.c:
> 
> 	if (!client_verify_mailbox_name(cmd, verify_name, subscribe, FALSE))
> 		return TRUE;

Hmm, maybe I'm showing my lack of understanding of the inner workings of
namespaces here (it is more than slightly possible!) but are you really
supposed to be able to subscribe to a namespace? On other servers with
this functionality that I have access to I think it's "selectable" but
not "subscribable" per say.

> Actually another problem you're going to have is those shared namespace
> subscriptions, unless you want to force every user to have same ones. If
> you don't, you'll need to set CONTROL path to user-specific directory.

Ah yes, I figured out the user-specific CONTROL and INDEX settings,
pretty cool. One question or minor detail about the user-specific INDEX
settings: it looks like Dovecot creates index folders for all namespace
folders including a folder called ".INBOX" which seems redundant since
the top level namespace (I assume "INBOX refers to the top level name
space in this case) shouldn't contain any messages, only folders, right?

> For Dovecot v1.1 I'll try to figure out how to make all this work
> better.

Awesome. Thanks for your patience Timo!

Cheers!

--Jo