[dovecot] Re: dovecot replacing uw-imap

[David Champion]

* On 2002.12.19, in <20021220021017.GA26615 at irccrew.org>,
*	"Timo Sirainen" <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> 
> Yeah. :) CVS Dovecot has already default_mail_path which supports $U as
> username. Using your idea of supporting $1U $2U etc. to limit it to first 1
> or 2 chars could be good enough idea to implement by default. Other than
> that, I don't see much use for the rest of the variables. Hmm. Except maybe

No, there's not a lot of use in most cases, but most of them were
possibilities we had pondered at one point or another. The real value
of the library, to me, is just the flexiblity it affords -- because
a site might have many products that need to interoperate, tying the
admins to a particular arrangement of folder paths can be frustrating.
Especially when making transitions from one product to another.

Using home directories embedded in the path to folders is something we
might yet switch to -- with so many users on a single system, it's all
about balancing users across multiple filesystems. Because our users
exist on the mail server and, separately, on a login server, the home
directory path is a useful way of tracking that for multiple systems.

The modulus operator was useful at one point, too... but I'm not sure
how much use it is for me to go defending each thing mailpath can do,
when the real point is that it can satisfy lots of needs without binding
particular software to particular disk configurations.

Everything gets weird when you support many thousands of users in one
place....

Anyway, just an offering -- if anyone does need this, it's out there.
We've gotten to where we don't particularly expect our applications to
fit our environment without some patching. :)


> separating "user at domain" username so that you could use path like
> /var/mail/domain/user/.

That would be handy.

-- 
 -D.	dgc at uchicago.edu	NSIT	University of Chicago
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