[Dovecot] Dovecot feature request: move /var/mail/uid to INBOX

[Steffen Kaiser]

Hello,

UW-Imap has a (questional, but for me useful) feature to slurp all mails 
pending in /var/mail/uid into the user's INBOX whenever the user 
successfully logs on and the INBOX is not configured as /var/mail/uid.

The usefulness for me is that users have a relatively small quota, so the 
noisy "over quota" messages pop up for everyone now and then, regardless 
how frequent one reads the mail.
When I now set a large quota for the "pending INBOX", where the user (aka 
dovecot) can only delete mails from, I circumvent those messages, prevent 
that users use the (large) INBOX as yet another place to pile up data (the 
user does not know about the pending INBOX at all) and let the users have 
"full" control over their folders.

The disadvantage is that it works for "real" users only.
Another disadvantage is that one would expect "LDA"-features in the server 
portion of Dovecot, e.g. Sieve :-), or the server would need to spawn the 
Dovecot-LDA somehow.

(Next thing is that, currently, the mails are delivered into the home 
directory of the users, what leads to several annoyances when someone is 
away for some time and finds his home directory locked, because the mass 
of mails locked the directory. Mostover, those IMAP servers I ran so far 
didn't allowed the user to delete a mail via IMAP often, because some temp 
or arbitary file couldn't created in the IMAP root. Because the user is 
already logged on onto Dovecot, there should be less problems deleting 
mails when the quota exceeds while slurping them in. At least I had 
extremly good experiences with this mechanism, when I used UW-Imap and the 
INBOX was located as mbx in the user's homedirectory.)

Bye,

-- 
Steffen Kaiser