Users with enough rope to hang themselves
Hello,
I keep finding myself in a corner with a user. He uses mail extensively, which is fine, he has a huge archive of own professional correspondence, which is fine, but he uses mail folders as if they were regular system folders, with very long paths, and keeps renaming them and moving them around, daily, breaking the mail index and ultimately wasting his own time looking around for lost mail. His Inbox holds a gargantuan of subfolders, causing both the client and the server to overwork each time he opens the mail. His Archive is a maze of subfolders with repeating names. I advised him almost daily across 20 year on how to stay organised, but he keeps abusing the service.
I want to help him by limiting what he can do with folders. This is the agenda:
the Archive is the only place where he can create folders;
folder names have a maximum length of 20 characters.
Can I do that with Dovecot?
Hello,
I keep finding myself in a corner with a user. He uses mail extensively, which is fine, he has a huge archive of own professional correspondence, which is fine, but he uses mail folders as if they were regular system folders, with very long paths, and keeps renaming them and moving them around, daily, breaking the mail index and ultimately wasting his own time looking around for lost mail. His Inbox holds a gargantuan of subfolders, causing both the client and the server to overwork each time he opens the mail. His Archive is a maze of subfolders with repeating names. I advised him almost daily across 20 year on how to stay organised, but he keeps abusing the service.
I want to help him by limiting what he can do with folders. This is the agenda:
the Archive is the only place where he can create folders;
folder names have a maximum length of 20 characters.
Can I do that with Dovecot?
I forgot...
- dovecot writes folders like any other program, that is, instead of writing
/.../folder.subfolder.subsubfolder/
it just writes
/.../folder/subfolder/subsubfolder/
-------- Original Message -------- On Apr 3, 2024, 22:15, Rupert Gallagher < ruga@protonmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I keep finding myself in a corner with a user. He uses mail extensively, which is fine, he has a huge archive of own professional correspondence, which is fine, but he uses mail folders as if they were regular system folders, with very long paths, and keeps renaming them and moving them around, daily, breaking the mail index and ultimately wasting his own time looking around for lost mail. His Inbox holds a gargantuan of subfolders, causing both the client and the server to overwork each time he opens the mail. His Archive is a maze of subfolders with repeating names. I advised him almost daily across 20 year on how to stay organised, but he keeps abusing the service.
I want to help him by limiting what he can do with folders. This is the agenda:
the Archive is the only place where he can create folders;
folder names have a maximum length of 20 characters.
Can I do that with Dovecot?
I forgot...
- dovecot writes folders like any other program, that is, instead of writing
/.../folder.subfolder.subsubfolder/
it just writes
/.../folder/subfolder/subsubfolder/
-------- Original Message -------- On Apr 3, 2024, 22:15, Rupert Gallagher < ruga@protonmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I keep finding myself in a corner with a user. He uses mail extensively, which is fine, he has a huge archive of own professional correspondence, which is fine, but he uses mail folders as if they were regular system folders, with very long paths, and keeps renaming them and moving them around, daily, breaking the mail index and ultimately wasting his own time looking around for lost mail. His Inbox holds a gargantuan of subfolders, causing both the client and the server to overwork each time he opens the mail. His Archive is a maze of subfolders with repeating names. I advised him almost daily across 20 year on how to stay organised, but he keeps abusing the service.
I want to help him by limiting what he can do with folders. This is the agenda:
the Archive is the only place where he can create folders;
folder names have a maximum length of 20 characters.
Can I do that with Dovecot?
This is ... bug like.
The user moves a folder inside another, the resulting path exceeds the maximum length, the folder's content is no longer accessible, the user complains.
Double trouble. The user proceeded to move the parent folder. Most subfolders moved as requested. Those whose path exceeded maxlength are stuck in the origin, and the full tree is no longer accessible: it is still there, you can see it, but the mail client says it was deleted.
I lost count of the number of times I had to rescue users out of this mess, by going in manually into dovecot's storage.
So...
+4. dovecot refuses to move folders if the resulting path exceeds the maximum length.
-------- Original Message -------- On Apr 3, 2024, 22:37, Rupert Gallagher wrote:
I forgot...
- dovecot writes folders like any other program, that is, instead of writing
/.../folder.subfolder.subsubfolder/
it just writes
/.../folder/subfolder/subsubfolder/
-------- Original Message -------- On Apr 3, 2024, 22:15, Rupert Gallagher < ruga@protonmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I keep finding myself in a corner with a user. He uses mail extensively, which is fine, he has a huge archive of own professional correspondence, which is fine, but he uses mail folders as if they were regular system folders, with very long paths, and keeps renaming them and moving them around, daily, breaking the mail index and ultimately wasting his own time looking around for lost mail. His Inbox holds a gargantuan of subfolders, causing both the client and the server to overwork each time he opens the mail. His Archive is a maze of subfolders with repeating names. I advised him almost daily across 20 year on how to stay organised, but he keeps abusing the service.
I want to help him by limiting what he can do with folders. This is the agenda:
the Archive is the only place where he can create folders;
folder names have a maximum length of 20 characters.
Can I do that with Dovecot?
This is ... bug like.
The user moves a folder inside another, the resulting path exceeds the maximum length, the folder's content is no longer accessible, the user complains.
Double trouble. The user proceeded to move the parent folder. Most subfolders moved as requested. Those whose path exceeded maxlength are stuck in the origin, and the full tree is no longer accessible: it is still there, you can see it, but the mail client says it was deleted.
I lost count of the number of times I had to rescue users out of this mess, by going in manually into dovecot's storage.
So...
+4. dovecot refuses to move folders if the resulting path exceeds the maximum length.
-------- Original Message -------- On Apr 3, 2024, 22:37, Rupert Gallagher < ruga@protonmail.com> wrote:
I forgot...
3. dovecot writes folders like any other program, that is, instead of
writing
/.../folder.subfolder.subsubfolder/
it just writes
/.../folder/subfolder/subsubfolder/
-------- Original Message --------
On Apr 3, 2024, 22:15, Rupert Gallagher < ruga@protonmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I keep finding myself in a corner with a user. He uses mail
extensively, which is fine, he has a huge archive of own professional
correspondence, which is fine, but he uses mail folders as if they
were regular system folders, with very long paths, and keeps renaming
them and moving them around, daily, breaking the mail index and
ultimately wasting his own time looking around for lost mail. His
Inbox holds a gargantuan of subfolders, causing both the client and
the server to overwork each time he opens the mail. His Archive is a
maze of subfolders with repeating names. I advised him almost daily
across 20 year on how to stay organised, but he keeps abusing the
service.
I want to help him by limiting what he can do with folders. This is
the agenda:
1. the Archive is the only place where he can create folders;
2. folder names have a maximum length of 20 characters.
Can I do that with Dovecot?This is ... bug like.
The user moves a folder inside another, the resulting path exceeds the maximum length, the folder's content is no longer accessible, the user complains.
I don't think this is a bad idea. If this is really the issue.
Double trouble. The user proceeded to move the parent folder. Most subfolders moved as requested. Those whose path exceeded maxlength are stuck in the origin, and the full tree is no longer accessible: it is still there, you can see it, but the mail client says it was deleted.
I lost count of the number of times I had to rescue users out of this mess, by going in manually into dovecot's storage.
So...
+4. dovecot refuses to move folders if the resulting path exceeds the maximum length.
I think it is possible to specify different storage for a single user via the (special?) user db. Why don't you try this, with this option LAYOUT=index
participants (2)
-
Marc
-
Rupert Gallagher