[dovecot] Re: shared folders?

[Moe Wibble]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 12:09:33PM +0200, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Moe Wibble wrote:
> >I must admit that I have never really understood (and only very briefly
> >browsed over) the idea of imap namespaces. With the little bit I know I'm
> >basically considering them mainly as a convenience for a person willing to
> >implement an imap server because they make it easier to have the imapd emulate
> >"virtual" folders to the client.
> >But why not just let the user arrange his folder hierarchy the way he likes
> >when what we are dealing with actually is a folder anyways?
> >I don't see the connection to shared folders.
> >And I don't see a reason why shared folders should be separated in a
> >different namespace?
> 
> The reason for this comes naturally from one of the main applications of
> shared folders, which is companies that share announcement and news
> folders across their employees. One shared folder may be called "finance",
> another may be "news".
> 
> Now, I personally have a mailbox called "news" which is a superior to
> "CNN.com", "Freshmeat.net" and so on. So I can't subscribe to the shared
> folder "news" unless it's in a different namespace. The namespace name
> usually starts with a character that is disallowed in regular mailboxes.  
> 
> So perhaps the company's namespace is "#thecompany". Now you can subscribe
> to two mailboxes whose names are both "news", one is just "news" or within
> some personal namespace "#personal/news", and one is "#thecompany/news".

So namespaces help to enforce corporate policies on folder names? ;)
No seriously, if you'd work with symlinks it'd be up to the user how to
name his folder and where to put it.
Aren't namespaces represented as folders in most clients anyways?
So what's the point about enforcing a folders name (or even worse
part of the structure of the folder tree) on the client side?

As said, it might be more convinient for the imapd because it only has
to prepend "#news" to the folder name instead of internally maintaining
a "virtual" folder that can be renamed and everything.
I'm not sure but I think at least mozilla displays namespaces as
toplevel folders. And I guess moving folders between namespaces
is not so easy, unless the client remembers some kind of mapping.
So what if a user prefers to have "CNN.com" under
#personal/news_n_stuff/web rather than #news?

I still don't see why shared folders need to exist in
a dedicated namespace...


regards
-- 
MW