Hi there,
Sorry to have so much trouble with my Dovecot setup & to ask so many questions, but I'm having some problems with shared folders. I've read the thread at <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2005-January/006079.html> and added the following lines to /etc/dovecot.conf:
namespace private {
separator = /
prefix =
inbox = yes
}
namespace public {
separator = /
prefix = General/
location = maildir:/tmp/dovecot-test/
inbox = no
hidden = no
}So I create a directory /tmp/dovecot-test/ and an empty file
/tmp/dovecot-test/dovecot-shared with liberal (777 & 666 respectively)
permissions and then try to subscribe to the "General" folder in
Outlook - I get a "failed to subscribe to the folder. The server
responded the mailbox doesn't exist: General" error message, but cur,
new & tmp are created in /tmp/dovecot-test. These subfolders are owned
by the user that attempted to subscribe & have 700 permissions;
chmod'ing them 777 makes no difference.
Since "default_mail_env = maildir:%h/.maildir" in dovecot.conf I make a directory /tmp/dovecot-test/.maildir also containing cur, new, tmp & dovecot-shared. When I select "IMAP folders" in Outlook I am still unable to subscribe to "General" but am now able to subscribe to "General/maildir". The subscribed folder is shown in Outlook underneath the users' Inbox as a sub-folder of general, screenshot at <http://linux.stroller.uk.eu.org/DovecotSharedFolders.png> - see how I can't subscribe to "General" alone, but it is "brought in" by subscribing to "General/maildir"? If I try to copy a test message into General then, after a delay of a minute or so, I get "Can't move the items - this IMAP command could not be sent to the server before the connect was terminated"; if I try to copy the test message into General/maildir then I immediately get "Can't copy the items. The server responded: `Internal error occurred. Refer to server log for more information [2005-12-20 12:05:40]".
I've tried tinkering with other directory structures under /tmp/dovecot-test/ with no success - can anyone suggest what I'm doing wrong, please?
It's quite important to me that the "General" folder is a fairly high-level one - only one additional folder icon should show up for the users' shared mail. At one point I managed to create a folder General/General, but that's undesirable - the users wouldn't understand the concept of having a folder showing in Outlook that they can't write to, or which is only used as a container for another folder. (In any case, I believe I was still unable to write to it).
I was about to say, "I know I could resolve this with the use of a symlink-type shared folder, but that's undesirable because I'd have to manually add the symlink for each user that's added to the system", but writing this it occurs to me that I could resolve that by adding the symlink to the the etc/skel/. Nevertheless, I see the namespaces approach as more elegant, as it allows for different user groups having different shared folders.
I'd appreciate any advice - I suspect I'm just getting the directory hierarchies wrong, or the syntax of dovecot.conf wrong AGAIN! If anyone with a working shared folders setup could provide a copy of the appropriate section of dovecot.conf & a listing of the appropriate directories then I'd be EXTREMELY grateful.
Stroller.