[dovecot] Re: Shared Folders?

[Moe Wibble]

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:
>  - No way to do it from IMAP client, ie. no ACL support. No plans to support
> that in near future

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