[Dovecot] Maildir Seen Flags not heeded when dovecot-shared present
Hi,
After many hours of searching (!) and lots of testing procmail scripts, I found the explanation I was looking for -- something you explained at http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2008-July/032551.html
That explains it.
Thing is, though, every time I've seen shared mailboxes -- really shared by multiple staff or not -- the preference is in fact for the shared behaviours to also "share" the Seen flags. Typically, someone doesn't want to read an email that someone else has already picked up and started dealing with or responded to. (They'll file it in due course, but the Seen flag is the first indicator that someone's opened and started to deal with it.)
Hacking source code and branching and whatnot isn't easy or done lightly, but I wondered if anything else had come to light in recent years about this issue.
I'd be as happy getting my procmail script to tell Dovecot to update the index based on the flag, but I'm pretty sure that's not possible :)
Any ideas greatly appreciated, thanks.
~ James.
On 26.6.2012, at 21.34, J E Lyon wrote:
After many hours of searching (!) and lots of testing procmail scripts, I found the explanation I was looking for -- something you explained at http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2008-July/032551.html
That explains it.
Thing is, though, every time I've seen shared mailboxes -- really shared by multiple staff or not -- the preference is in fact for the shared behaviours to also "share" the Seen flags. Typically, someone doesn't want to read an email that someone else has already picked up and started dealing with or responded to. (They'll file it in due course, but the Seen flag is the first indicator that someone's opened and started to deal with it.)
Hacking source code and branching and whatnot isn't easy or done lightly, but I wondered if anything else had come to light in recent years about this issue.
So you don't want shared seen flags? You can simply not create dovecot-shared file nowadays. It's not necessary. The only other purpose for it was as the template for file permissions, but those are nowadays taken from the maildir itself: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Permissions
On 26 Jun 2012, at 21:49, Timo Sirainen wrote:
So you don't want shared seen flags? You can simply not create dovecot-shared file nowadays. It's not necessary. The only other purpose for it was as the template for file permissions, but those are nowadays taken from the maildir itself: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Permissions
Timo,
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction . .
I started with Dovecot back in the pre-v1 days and used dovecot-shared from when it first helped with permissions and things -- never actually minded about seen flags back then.
So, I've always thought of dovecot-shared as being primarily about making the permissions work, and hadn't realised things have been steadily changing in that regard.
So, I now have Dovecot on both CentOS 5.5 & CentOS 6, which means v1 & v2 . . unfortunately though, the CentOS 5.5 default package is 1.0.x and that means I miss out on 1.1+ features there, as well as the improved handling of file permissions in 1.2 that I now see after scrutinising the differences . .
At least I know exactly where the problems are now, thanks!
~ James.
Timo & List,
Just by way of a follow-up, running tests on a 1.0 installation of Dovecot confirms it.
Sure enough, I was still configuring my mail stores based on my outdated understanding and hadn't fully appreciated changes to what dovecot-shared files affect in recent versions.
Thanks all, J.
On 27 Jun 2012, at 11:01, J E Lyon wrote:
On 26 Jun 2012, at 21:49, Timo Sirainen wrote:
So you don't want shared seen flags? You can simply not create dovecot-shared file nowadays. It's not necessary. The only other purpose for it was as the template for file permissions, but those are nowadays taken from the maildir itself: http://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Permissions
Timo,
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction . .
I started with Dovecot back in the pre-v1 days and used dovecot-shared from when it first helped with permissions and things -- never actually minded about seen flags back then.
So, I've always thought of dovecot-shared as being primarily about making the permissions work, and hadn't realised things have been steadily changing in that regard.
So, I now have Dovecot on both CentOS 5.5 & CentOS 6, which means v1 & v2 . . unfortunately though, the CentOS 5.5 default package is 1.0.x and that means I miss out on 1.1+ features there, as well as the improved handling of file permissions in 1.2 that I now see after scrutinising the differences . .
At least I know exactly where the problems are now, thanks!
~ James.
participants (2)
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J E Lyon
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Timo Sirainen