[Dovecot] 2.0.12 (fa2e92526716): Deleting mails and folders from public namespaces

[Willie Gillespie]

On 5/25/2011 5:12 AM, Binarus wrote:
> It seems that the problems come from the fact that deletion is done by
> renaming. I am not in IMAP but suppose that there is some rename command
> which is used by email clients in such cases. Maybe there is also a
> delete command which dovecot is "emulating" by doing a rename - I really
> don't know...

Just a little correction here:  Deletion is NOT done by renaming. 
Deletion of folders is done with a DELETE command which gets rid of it 
entirely.  What your mail clients are doing is renaming the folder, 
which is done with a RENAME command.

For example, if "SomeFolder" is deleted then your mail client is doing:
RENAME "SomeFolder" "Trash.SomeFolder"
which effectively just moves the folder as a subfolder of Trash.

So, mail clients are asking to rename the folder (not delete it) in the 
case you are concerned about.

Timo, you said
 > Talking only about ACLs I guess it would be ok to allow renaming from
 > public namespace to a private namespace. Renaming one of your own
 > private mailboxes to public namespace is a bit trickier, because the
 > default ACL is "no permissions". So when renaming, a new explicit ACL
 > should be added to the user who did the renaming, because otherwise
 > user could no longer access that mailbox at all. Still doable I guess.

I don't think any ACL should be added automatically in this case.  If 
they set their trash folder to be in a public/shared namespace for which 
they have only CREATE permissions, then I think that's their fault and 
the admins problem... not Dovecot's.