[Dovecot] Not understanding namespaces

[Timo Sirainen]

On Fri, 2010-01-29 at 16:18 -0500, Stewart Dean wrote:
> 
> Timo Sirainen wrote:
> > Maybe your main confusion comes from Thunderbird's settings. It has almost nothing to do with Dovecot's namespaces. 
> Golly!  <mutter muttermutter>
> 
> > The namespace configuration in TB is mostly a workaround for some servers.
> >
> > I guess you've read http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces?
> >   
> Again and again until I have a flat spot on my forehead from banging my 
> head against the wall.  What's there is perfectly understandable as far 
> as it goes, but I'm having trouble with the larger context, things like:
> - How does a user (or client automagic) select or access among multiple 
> namespaces?

Typically clients are stupid and they don't understand namespaces at
all. So Dovecot's namespaces are made to be pretty much transparent to
clients. So for example if you had namespaces:

1) prefix = ""
2) prefix = "foo/"
3) prefix = "bar/"

All all of them had list=yes, then the mailboxes in 2) namespace would
simply show up as children of "foo" mailbox. And 3) namespace would show
up as children of "bar". Client wouldn't even know that they're in
different namespaces.

> - Can they select more than one namespace, can they select from a 
> hierachy, ex, could I have a mbox namespace first and if it's not found, 
> fall down the hierarchy to a Maildir namespace

In theory, yes, but in practice you shouldn't think of it that way. Just
think of namespaces as a way to tell Dovecot to access mails from more
than one location. Or in migration cases maybe to create aliases to
other namespaces for clients with "bad" namespace settings.

Also in any case INBOX must always point to a single mailbox in a single
namespace. There can be only one namespace in dovecot.conf with
inbox=yes.
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