shared folders not working with . separator

[Hugh Bragg]

On 19/02/2016 2:14 AM, Christian Kivalo wrote:
> On 2016-02-18 15:21, Hugh Bragg wrote:
>> Thanks, this helped.
>> I added namespace virtual and removed the virtual references from inbox
>> namespace and added list = yes so now I can see shared folder in the
>> client.
>> There's still nothing in there though.
>>
>> I followed Christian's advice, debug shows this very strange behaviour.
>> doveadm acl debug -u user1 at domain1.com.au shared.user2 at domain2.com.au
>> doveadm(user1 at domain1.com.au): Error: Mailbox 'com.au' in namespace
>> 'shared.user2 at domain2.' doesn't exist in
>> /var/mail/vhosts/domain2/user2/mail/.com.au
>> There are no errors in the log.
> You will probably run into problems with your unsernames containing
> "." and have the separator set to ".".
>
> Take a look at this (very) old thread from the mailinglist, that's the
> same problem
> http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2011-January/056135.html
>
> And as mentioned by Timo here
> http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2011-January/056149.html
>> In any case having '.' both in usernames and as hierarchy separator just
>> isn't going to work.
>
> I switched from system users to virtual users with my last server
> migration and changed separator from "." to "/" just because of this.
>
> It could be that auth_username_translation can help. Look in
> 10-auth.conf for an explanation for that setting. I haven't tested it
> though.
>
>> This looks like a bug. I was seeing this before I got the shared folder
>> working when I saw dovecot had created these extra folders and added
>> dovecot-acl-list file there.
>> I suppose if I'd used the / separator, this would work fine, but there
>> was nothing about this on the wiki so I didn't expect this.
>
> You could also use "/" as separator for the shared namespace and the
> "." for the other namespaces. As it's not working anyway there should
> be no problems with your MUAs.
>
That auth_username_translation looks dodgy.
When I read those threads before, I though the problem was confined to
usernames.
Surely there should be some sort of documentation on this to prevent
people wasting countless hours trying it.
The wiki documentation recommends using . separator for Maildir++
because it's native imap.

I still think this is a bug. For some reason virtual handles it with no
problem, but shared falls in a heap.
To me it looks like %% and % are interpreted differently. depending on
the namespace type.
Surely,
maildir:/var/mail/vhosts/%%d/%%n/mail:INDEX=/var/mail/vhosts/%d/%n/shared/%%u
is no harder to translate than virtual:/var/mail/vhosts/%d/%n/virtual
should I file a bug report?

I'm not confident changing the separator to /. I have a lot of mails
imported with the . separator and I'm worried something will get lost.

- Hugh