I have a little tricky issue around here. First some background:
Every user is assigned their own ZFS filesystem, and it's mounted as /home/USER with a Maildir inside it. The there is a filesystem snapshot (read-only) taken automatically every day by the system. The idea is to allow users easy access to backup copies of their mail so that they can restore things themself..
For example this structure (somewhat abbreviated, some files/dirs removed):
/home/testson/ .zfs/ snapshot/ 2007-06-18/ Maildir/ cur/ new/ tmp/ .Trash/ cur/ new/ tmp/ Maildir/ cur/ new/ tmp/ .Trash/ cur/ new/ tmp/
Now,I can access the normal Maildir INBOX and folders nicely via Dovecot/IMAP. The thing is I'd like to be able to access the snapshot too via Dovecot/IMAP somehow. My first idea was to use Dovecots namespace feature like this in the config file:
namespace private {
separator = /
prefix = snapshot/
location =
maildir:~/.zfs/snapshot/2007-06-18/Maildir:CONTROL=~/.dovecot/control:INDEX=~/.dovecot/index }
This works great for the mail folders inside the Maildir - but not for the INBOX which isn't displayed at all... (Ie, under the "snapshot" prefix I only see "Trash" etc when looking at the folder from an IMAP client).
I think that I'd need to use the "INBOX=" option for Dovecot to see the top-level "new/cur/tmp" directories in the snapshot folder, but you can only have one INBOX if I'm not mistaken?
Any suggestions on how best to configure this?
- Peter