On 3/6/2012 8:28 AM, Steve Campbell wrote:
http://wiki.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes That's where most of my questions originated, but thanks for the reply.
Steve, all the information you need is behind that link.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding concepts here
Very possibly.
What I've done in the past with the old imap server is to create an account (unix account), so the smtp server puts the mbox (what is referred to as the INbox) in /var/spool/mail. Users who needed to "share" this mailbox would be give the account user name and the password for this account and would add an Imap account to their mail client. This would sometimes cause locking problems or client corruption due to email removals mostly. This is basically a normal, non-shared account.
Locking problems with multiple users hitting mbox files is unavoidable. The same is true when a single user hits an mbox from multiple client devices simultaneously--PC, smart phone, tablet, etc. Which is why you do not want to use mbox file format for shared mailboxes, but maildir instead, because each email is a separate file. Please note, from the link I provided:
Maildir: Per-user \Seen flag
With Maildir a dovecot-shared file controls if the \Seen flags are shared or private. The file must be created separately inside each Maildir, although if the file already exists in the Maildir root it's automatically copied for newly created mailboxes. If dovecot-shared file doesn't exist in Maildir, the \Seen flags are shared. If it exists, the \Seen flag state is stored only in the user's index files. By making each user have their own private index files, you can make the \Seen flag private for the users.
Simple concept above: each user of the shared mailbox sees "new" mail. One user accessing new mail and marking it as read doesn't mark that message as read for other shared users. You can not do this with mbox file format, only maildir.
Maildir: Keyword sharing
Make sure you don't try to use per-user CONTROL directory. Otherwise dovecot-keywords file doesn't get shared and keyword mapping breaks.
Other mailbox formats
Currently you can't have any per-user flags with other mailbox formats than Maildir.
-- Stan