[Dovecot] Shared mboxes

[Steve Campbell]

On 3/7/2012 3:47 PM, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> On 3/6/2012 3:01 PM, Steve Campbell wrote:
>
>> I've experienced that type of locked mailbox before on the old server.
>> Users insist on accessing their email account as a pop account on their
>> desktop with the "check for new mail every so many minutes" turned on
>> and still keep their smartphones on while accessing it as an imap
>> account so they can still download the files to their desktop when they
>> return.
> Using IMAP on the phone and POP on the PC doesn't make any sense.  Is
> there a (valid) reason why these people insist on this phone/IMAP and
> PC/POP setup?  This seems seriously counter intuitive/productive.
The bulk of these type users are sales staff. They use their desktop 
when their in the office. For years, the only type of email account we 
used was pop just because that was the way it was. We used horde for 
webmail, which read these type of accounts just fine. Once they needed 
email in the field, it was necessary to either set up their phones to 
use pop and keep email on the server so that they could download the 
email to their desktop, or use imap on the phones. They typically don't 
use any folders they've created on the imap account when accessing mail 
on the desktop.

It would be a nightmare going to each desktop, finding a time when each 
and every user would have the time to allow us to change things, and 
switching all of the accounts.

It may not seem to be a good way of doing things, but it's just the way 
our system here has evolved. Now that we're down to skeleton-type 
staffing, it's not easy to find the time and manpower to accomplish 
change when it "ain't broke". The occasional locked mailbox was easier 
to resolve that the massive change to all user's accounts. This all came 
about because I installed a new server to replace the old, and dovecot 
became the pop/imap server.
>
>> So just to clarify, is it OK to have a maildir account setup on this
>> server for these shared/imap access only accounts along with the mbox
>> accounts already on there?
> Yes.  With Dovecot it is possible to specify mail_location on a per user
> basis:
>
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailLocation
>
> You can even do a split mailbox type setup per user using multiple
> namespaces, for example specifying that INBOX use mbox with all other
> mail being stored in maildir format:
>
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces
>
>> Thanks for the patience and help
> Sure thing.
Again, thanks for the help.