[Dovecot] shared mailboxes and indexes

[Timo Sirainen]

On 16.11.2012, at 12.11, Angel L. Mateo wrote:

> 	We are deploying shared mailboxes in our mail system. We are running 2.1.9 and mail backend is maildir.
> 
> 	As described at http://wiki.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Shared when shared namespace is configured as
> 
> namespace shared {
>  separator = /
>  prefix = shared/%%u/
>  location = maildir:%%h/Maildir:INDEX=~/Maildir/shared/%%u
>  subscriptions = no
>  list = children
> }
> 
> 	each user accessing this folder has its own index, stored in ~/Maildir/shared/%%u/<shared mailbox>, hasn't it?

Right.

> 	Our mail is store in NFS disks so we are very concerned about indexes optimizations (we had performance problems until we got all of our indexes and nfs tunned). So, is there any way so those indexes could be shared for all users (and they always would be updated).

If you don't need per-user flags you can just remove the per-user INDEX. If you want per-user flags and want to share indexes, you need the new INDEXPVT option that exists in v2.2 or as a patch to v2.1: http://dovecot.org/patches/2.1/private-index.diff

> 	Regarding this... if we'd use dbox instead of maildir, indexes are a really important part of the mailbox and they can't be re-constructed when they are outdated. So, how do shared mailboxes work with dbox backend? Do I have to configure indexes in any particular way?

INDEXPVT is a requirement with dbox if you want per-user flags.

BTW. Do you have multiple Dovecot backend servers? Director works only when you're not using shared mailboxes..