After doing some digging through old mailing list threads, I fonud the following information on the 'path' directive for dicts.

http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2009-April/038922.html

It looks like paths are hard coded per plugin, and you simply select one of the hard coded paths (this is what I gathered from the thread, I have not verified the accuracy of this).

After taking a romp through the Dovecot source, I was able to gather that as far as I can tell, the lvalue of anything inside of the fields{} block will be evaluated as a SQL expression, unless the expression includes characters '/' or '\\'. So in my case, the following configuration will *theoretically* meet my needs.

map { pattern = shared/shared-boxes/user/$to/$from table = mailbox_user_map value_field = mailbox_user fields { mailbox_user||'@'||mailbox_domain = $from user_name||'@'||user_domain = $to } }

This is untested though, and I have almost certainly overlooked some devilish detail. Will report back further once I have time to test.

On 2015-03-13 05:48, james@lottspot.com wrote:

Hello, list!

I am in the midst of configuring a new Dovecot IMAP server, and I'm preparing to setup shard mailboxes as part of the ocnfiguration. In order to get these setup the way I want, I've figured out that I'm going to have to setup an acl_shared_dict. This is where things start to get confusing for me, as I have had difficulty finding thorough explanations of dictionary configuration.

My primary concern is that all my user details are stored in a sqlite database in which the '%n' and '%d' components of username/email addresses are stored in separate columns. The SQL dictionary example in the Shared Mailboxes document [http://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Shared] assumes that the username is stored as a singular '%n@%d' key. In my authdb lookups, I use sqlite syntax to concatenate the '%n' and '%d' columns around a '@' character to find the user. Is it possible to implement an acl_shared_dict in some similar fashion?

My second question, which is completely unrelated and more out of morbid curiosity than anything (although it could affect my configuration decisions) is that I noticed every dictionary which shows up in the documentation has a "pattern" field. In the case of the acl_shared_dict example, the pattern is 'shared/shared-boxes/user/$to/$from'. I couldn't figure out by studying the example where this value was derived from, or indeed where it is derived from in any example dictionaries which are documented. Can anyone explain the meaning of the "pattern" field and what exactly its value means?

Thanks in advance for all your helpful answers! :)