[Dovecot] Option to evaluate IMAP prefixes relative to $HOME, rather than the IMAP root?

[David McBride]

Greetings,

Is there a mechanism (or relatively small source-code change) which would cause
Dovecot to evaluate IMAP prefixes relative to $HOME rather than the configured
IMAP root?

 * * *

Background:

We're currently migrating from a WU-IMAP mailserver configuration which stores
user mail in a global NFS-exported $HOME, and we've run into well-known issues
handling client-specified IMAP prefixes.

If a user specifies an IMAP prefix, Dovecot evaluates the path given relative to
the  IMAP root path specified in mail_location, rather than resolving it
relative to the user's home directory as our old WU-IMAP installation would do.

(For example: if a user has been keeping their mail in $HOME/foobar, and
mail_location's folder path is set to %h/mail, then when that user comes to
retrieve their mail with an IMAP prefix set to "~/foobar", then Dovecot will
attempt to return the contents of the folder $HOME/mail/~/foobar -- which
doesn't exist -- rather than $HOME/foobar.)

At the moment, we have several hidden namespaces set up to support various
common user-side variations -- "mail/", "Mail/", "~/Mail/", etc. -- each with a
different custom mail_location string.

Whilst this works for these common cases, it's fairly ugly, and results in extra
empty directories appearing in users' $HOME.

If there was some mechanism for telling Dovecot to evaluate IMAP prefixes
relative to $HOME rather than the mail folder root specified in mail_location,
that would provide us with a much neater and general-purpose solution.

(I was hoping that setting full_filesystem_access=yes would do this, but it only
relaxes the normal access permissions.)

Cheers,
David
-- 
David McBride <dwm at tastycake.net>

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