[Dovecot] Shared mailboxes and accessing MailDir not through IMAP

[Timo Sirainen]

On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 09:53 +0200, Steffen Kaiser wrote:
> I'm testing Dovecot that is part of Debian/sarge (v0.99.14-1).
> So far so good. I have migrated some mailboxes for testing with success 
> and seems that everything works fine.
> 
> One thing I do not figure out is, what to do about shared mailboxes, which 
> are the very reason of searching for an alternative IMAP server,
> 
> The Wiki states that there is some sort of shared mailboxes, based upon 
> symlinks. Well, but since which version actually?? The Changelog stops at 
> 2003-11-08 21:12 ?

It requires 1.0-stable releases. With 0.99.x only way to have "shared
mailboxes" is to have a shared userid under which people log in to read
the mail.

The problem with 0.99.x is that all files that are created will have
mode 0600, so only the user who created the file is able to read them.
Even if users don't create new mail files, they'll still need to update
dovecot-uidlist file.

> I setup all Unix-permissions of the folders (. cur new tmp: u=rwx,g=srwx) 
> and their parents (u=rwx,g=x).
> Then I placed a symlink into the maildir of all users.
> Each user caches the INDEXes into an individual /var/ directory, not in 
> the maildirs themselves. (BTW: I wonder why I need to give the group write 
> permission to the base directory '.').

Because dovecot-uidlist is created there.

> Now I wonder, what impact I'm to expect here? Esp. "The only problem is 
> that currently everyone's message flags would be shared as well."
> (quote from a message of a thread taken from the Wiki)

Actually with 1.0-stable the Seen-flag is per-user private, other flags
are shared (ie. if one user set Replied-flag, others will see it too).

> Then there is http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2003-March/001113.html
> the third item will apply to my situation, I guess.
> MailDir is (sort of) expected to be read by mutt directly, for instance. 

That mail is really old. The maildir code has long since been fixed to
work transparently with external changes.

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