Looking back through the mail, I found the following from March

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 16:15 +0000, Mark Lidstone wrote:

Hi all,

I was wondering if the above was possible. I know that the "seen" flag is stored in the filename, but was wondering if anyone knew of a way to separate it out? I know this would strictly-speaking break maildir compatibility, but it would be extremely useful for shared folders.

The way this worked at one point was by making each user have separate index file for the mailbox, then keeping the \Seen flag only inside that index file and ignoring the maildir's seen flag completely. Then I rewrote the maildir syncing code and this part was dropped out. Probably wouldn't be too difficult to make it work again.. Yea, looks like it wasn't. Works now in CVS.

I'm trying to do a similar thing now, but without 100% luck. I have the following namespaces defined

namespace public { separator = / prefix = Public/ location = maildir:/var/mail/scouts/public:CONTROL=/var/mail/scouts/%1n/%n/shared-settings/public/control:INDEX=/var/mail/scouts/%1n/%n/shared-settings/public/index hidden = no }

namespace public { separator = / prefix = Official/ location = maildir:/var/mail/scouts/official::INDEX=/var/mail/scouts/%1n/%n/shared-settings/official/index hidden = no }

Even though I have separate INDEX's for the second public namespace, the SEEN flag doesn't seem to be picked up from the users' INDEX's. BUT, for the first namespace, when I have CONTROL defined as well, it IS picked up!

The reason I don't want CONTROL defined for the second name space, is I discovered that I can force all users on the system, to be subscribed to mailboxes in the 'Official' name space, if I keep CONTROL with the mailbox, instead of separate, and ensure that once I have set up the subscriptions file, I ensure it can't be changed. The counter side of this 'subscriptions' hack, is that I can't do hidden=yes. Ideally, I want a method of forcing a subscription on every user, that they can't change, but still preserving the SEEN flag. The closest I have come to, is, separate CONTROL, INDEX, and hidden=yes. This requires though, that I use the SquirrelMail forced subscriptions extension, which I've not yet tested. The other idea I had, was a method for having subscriptions come out of a database, seeing as I already have a large block of user data in the SQL database, and if I could have subscriptions in there as well, that would be a huge bonus! (Even better if it was only for the namespaces I wanted, cause I don't need to put each users personal subscriptions in a database).

Anyway, it's mainly ideas, other than the SEEN flag issue I described above. Hope someone has ideas for getting it to work.

Tim

Linux Counter user #273956