[Dovecot] Shared mboxes

[Steve Campbell]

On 3/5/2012 6:16 PM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> On 3/5/2012 1:30 PM, Steve Campbell wrote:
>> I've been looking at some documentation on shared mail accounts. But I'm
>> getting mixed thoughts on how this can or should be done.
>>
>> I use mbox for all my pop and imap folders since I've converted from a
>> uw-imap server. The first thing that makes me wonder about setup is that
>> I've been told to not use maildir and mbox on the same machine, although
>> I'm not really sure why since it seems this would work OK, but anyway,
>> I'm guessing I should stick with mbox for the shared accounts.
>>
>> Secondly, I'm sure I'd need a namespace to use which ever format, so
>> there's private, public, and shared types. Most of the stuff I'm reading
>> seems to suggest "public" as a type instead of "shared". So what's
>> shared for anyway?
>>
>> I want to use this shared account so that email can be sent to this
>> account, and be shared by only a few people, but I'm reading where locks
>> and such don't work with mbox, so in my mind, how do you avoid
>> corruption and why not just make a normal account and let people hack
>> away at the data?
>>
>> I've not even got to the questions in my mind about how to set up the
>> account, but figured if I could get the above straight, I might be able
>> to fuddle my way through it.
>>
>> Help would be truly appreciated.
> Start here:
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes
That's where most of my questions originated, but thanks for the reply.

(Sorry for the first response - I sent it to the poster, not the list).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding concepts here and I'm trying to use something 
I don't need to use. I'm really new to dovecot, and as I learn all the 
ins and outs, I'm finding a lot of this doesn't seem to be "turning on 
any light bulbs" until after I've played with it a while.

What I've done in the past with the old imap server is to create an 
account (unix account), so the smtp server puts the mbox (what is 
referred to as the INbox) in /var/spool/mail. Users who needed to 
"share" this mailbox would be give the account user name and the 
password for this account and would add an Imap account to their mail 
client. This would sometimes cause locking problems or client corruption 
due to email removals mostly. This is basically a normal, non-shared 
account.

Now that I've moved to dovecot on a new, updated server, I'd like to use 
the facilities of dovecot for the truly shared accounts. I'm not sure if 
I need to create the account like before, but seems like I'd have to in 
order to get the smtp server to deliver new email to /var/spool/mail/%u.

As I see it, I've got to create a namespace for shared accounts and 
configure this on the multiple-user's clients so that when they access 
the Inbox and imap files under /home/%u/mail, they don't butt heads, so 
they're some locking involved. I could use acls for this, but don't have 
to according to the documentation. I can grant permissions to each user 
that is included in the acl, and I can create dovecot "groups" to use as 
a basis for this permission.

I'm hoping this is pretty much the way it's done, and I want to keep 
with mbox format for all files and folders. I'm also hoping that this is 
the way it's supposed to be used, but I get conflicting ideas about what 
the documentation is really telling me.

Anyway, I'll play with this and see where I get. I've still not found 
out where to create these dovecot "groups" other than it seems to use a 
userdb file somewhere.

Thanks for the help so far

steve
>