On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 05:59:03PM +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 02:12:51PM +0100, Moe Wibble wrote:

...

Are there any plans to make shared folders available in dovecot anytime soon?

Well .. it's kind of possible already with symlinks, eg.:

ln -s /home/shared/Maildir/.shared.folder /home/user/Maildir/

Interesting. That's exactly what I've tried but it didn't work. The linked folder did show up in the subscribe-dialog but couldn't be subscribed. I didn't save the error-message 'cause it was reproducable so it seemed like dovecot simply didn't feel comfortable with that symlink in a maildir.

Humm. I even disabled all the chroot-switches in dovecot.conf during that test. Well, I'll try again tomorrow!

Problems with that: that in near future

• No way to do it from IMAP client, ie. no ACL support. No plans to support

We don't need no ACL, no problem here. :) Read-only folders would be nice to have but that shouldn't be too difficult to achieve thru unix file-permissions/ownership.

• Sharing index files may not be that good idea from security point of view, especially if users have direct access to filesystem. Specifying different location for index files would then be good idea so each user would have their own: default_mail_env = Maildir:~/Maildir:INDEX=~/indexes

Gotta look into that. Not really a security issue here since the imapd acts as a blackbox anyways; no user accounts.

Doesn't dovecot get confused by multiple users sharing the same index for, say, their INBOX, tho?

That default_mail_env line will do for me anyways. :)

• If indexes aren't shared, there may be occational syncing problems when someone changes message flag and another user just tries to fetch the message. Dovecot will give "message not found" error, but next fetch will work. This will be fixed by re-syncing maildir folder when it can't find some file.

Can live with that.

• Sharing mbox files won't have the above problem, but flag changes aren't noted by other users until you close the mailbox. I'll probably fix this later so that the flag changes are written to mbox at least once in a few seconds (if not immediately)

mbox is dead and bzipped. ;)

• All users will have shared mail flags

I think that's even desirable for our environment. Might be a misfeature for others, tho.

Thanks for your quick response! I'll retry that little symlink-stunt tomorrow and let you know about the results. :)

best regards

MW