Hi, I'm trying to add some sanity to a badly thought out mail system that, for various reasons, cant be fixed from the bottom up at this moment in time. The system is debian sarge, exim 4.5, doing virtual domains and delivering into mboxes in /var/spool/virtual/$domain/$user , there is webmail access and this allows user to create folders in (dont shoot me!) /etc/openwebmail/users/$domain/$username/mail/ , the files in this directory appear to be mboxes in that each mail begins with a From: line, the naming of these files is completely arbitrary.

Im trying to add imap access that would ideally give users access to the mail in /var , and also in the openwebmail dirs, though the latter is not essential, just desirable.

All mails are owned by user mail.

I've installed dovecot-imapd version 0.99.14-1, but if this doesnt have the namespace additions from version 1.0-test, I can easily install that. Reading the wiki, it seems I can achieve this with namespaces, something like

namespace private { separator = / inbox = yes prefix = location = mbox:/etc/openwebmail/users/%d/%u/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/virtual/%d/%u }

But, Im not quite sure where this would go in the config file, going by the example config you can just shoehorn them into the middle of the file, but I'm not 100% sure...

I had been trying to use things like..

default_mail_env = mbox:/var/folders/%d/%u:INBOX=/var/spool/virtual/%d/%u:INDEX=/var/indexes/%d/%n

Having created the necessary folders in /var , but I didnt have much success (the authentication part worked straight away using my passwd file), And having read more and been told about namespaces on the irc channel, it seemed like I should go that way anyway.

If anyone could give me a steer in the right direction, or even tell me i'm wasting my time (tho dont bother telling me how much better maildir etc is, i know!)

Thanks for your time.

-- Pete