Policy on folder's name and path's length

[Rupert Gallagher]

Hello,

Users can be really good at hanging everybody when you give them enough roope. I spotted a number of problems that I think are of interest to everybody and need mitigation.

# length of path

A busy Windows user wrote enough mail subfolders, and folder names with soo many characters, that exceed Windows maximum path length. To avoid taxing the mail server, their mail client (Thunderbird) is configured to keep a local copy of emails.

I need to enforce a policy on the maximum path length they can create, and the maximum number of characters on any given folder name.

# forbidden characters

Another problem folder names was the presence of white spaces, note the plural, on both the beginning and end of folder names. For example, to emphasize the importance of folders, the user added white spaces in front of names:

> Must be at the top
> Very important
> A bit less important
>Normal stuff

And to add insult to injury they wrote spaces at the end of folder names:

> This is a folder name with two hidden spaces

I need to enfoce a policy that forbids the use white spaces at the beginning and end of folder names, as well as the use of repeated characters:

> ____ I spotted your policy and found this new trick

# subfolders, everywhere...

A user confused their IMAP account for a file system and mind map tool, so they created folders everywhere, including root folders at the same level of inbox, draft, junk, trash, and huge directories under inbox.

I need to enforce a policy that allows the creation of folders only under /Archive.

I think such policies make good sense on any dovecot server and should be enforced by default.
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