[Dovecot] Initial support for shared mailboxes

[Sascha Wilde]

Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> writes:

> On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 10:46 +0200, Sascha Wilde wrote:
>> > namespace shared {
>> >   separator = /
>> >   # %%u gets expanded to the remote user. Instead of %%u you can
>> >   # also use %%n and %%d.
>> >   prefix = shared/%%u/
>> >   location = Maildir:/home/%%u/Maildir:INDEX=~/Maildir/shared/%%u
>> > }
>> 
>> Sounds great, and it's an essential feature we need to make Dovecot work
>> with Kolab Server.
>> 
>> Is there a %%h, too?  So that, if we have 
>> 
>>   mail_location = maildir:~
> ..
>> Another (more specific) problem in this context: Is is it possible to
>> determine a users home calling an external program like checkpassword?
>> This would be needed in an setup, where the users $HOME is set by an
>> checkpassword program to an compute value, to access another users
>> mailbox.
>
> This would require doing a userdb lookup from dovecot-auth the same way
> as deliver or expire-tool does it.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "this" here, are you referring to
the proposed `%%h' variable, too or only to my more specific problem
with computer HOME paths?

> So sure it'd be possible, but I'm not
> really interested in implementing it yet. I think expire-tool is
> currently using copy&pasted code from deliver, those could be merged
> into some library function and then the namespace code could easily use
> the same function.

But is deliver currently able to utilize an external program to
get user data?  

From reading the docs I got the impression that userdb only allows to
use data supplied by an arbitrary program by the "Prefetch" backend in
combination with an checkpassword passdb, and that deliver can't use
this mechanism as the user doesn't login when deliver is run.

So I guess what is needed is a new userdb backend which is explicitly
runs an arbitrary external program to get the user data (instead of
caching the passdb results).

What do you think?

cheers
sascha
-- 
Sascha Wilde                                      OpenPGP key: 4BB86568
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück             http://www.intevation.de/~wilde/
Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HR B 18998             http://www.intevation.de/
Geschäftsführer: Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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