[Dovecot] Per user namespace

[Adam McDougall]

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 11:13 -0600, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
>   
>> I'm in the process of upgrading an old server which is running 
>> uw-imap to a new one running Dovecot.  With the old machine, 
>> unfortunately, my users had the opportunity to store their e-mails in 
>> various locations.  For example, some have their mail boxes stored in 
>> ~/mail/[various mbox files], others ALSO have a ~/mail/clients/[various 
>> mbox files] and yet others simply stored them in their ~/ path (thanks 
>> to the old IMAP).  Is there a way to create per-user namespaces?  I 
>> don't want to create a "mail/", "mail/clients/", etc., etc. global name 
>> space that will end up showing up on everyone's mail client, nor do I 
>> want to individually change each user's setup (and rewrite their 
>> .subscriptions file).
>>     
>
> I think the best solution would be to just finally standardize
> everyone's mailboxes under ~/mail/. It'll probably help you in future..
>
> But yeah, it's possible to create per-user namespaces by returning
> namespace_* extra fields from your userdb. There isn't existing
> documentation how exactly to do that, but basically you'll just have to
> return the same namespace_* fields that exist in NAMESPACE_* environment
> variables. You can get a dump of those using post-login script, see
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/PostLoginScripting. Alternatively you could just
> set up those NAMESPACE_* settings directly in the post-login script by
> e.g. reading some file from home dir. But don't let users specify
> anything, the process is still running as root at that point and they'll
> get root privileges by changing just a few environment settings..
>
> http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual also gives a simple example how
> to return a different inbox=yes namespace for different users.
>   
It sounds like a similar issue I had to deal with, I ended up making 
several global
name-spaces equivalent to ~, ~/mail, and ~/Mail but I made the last two 
hidden so
legacy client setups will still work but new clients would not 
automatically find
them.  The only drawback I found was client apparently could not see my 
public
folder namespaces unless they used the ~ namespace (blank prefix in the 
client).
Since so few of my users need public folders I was fine with that.