[Dovecot] How many namespaces for several groups of shared mailboxes ?

[Thomas Hummel]

Hello Timo,

let's say you want to implement several distinct groups of shared mailboxes via
one (several) public namespace(s) with dovecot-1.1.x/Maildir. For instance,
team1, team2 and team3 work on different projects (project1, project2,
project3).

Obviously, as many public namespaces (#team1, #team2, #team3) would do the
trick, but then, any user (including users who don't belong to any above team)
would 'see' useless non-selectionable folders #team*.

So my idea would be to create only one public namespace (#Public) into which I'd
store directories team1, team2, team3, into which I'd put the needed shared
mailboxes. Something like

  /courriel/boites/public/team1/.shared-project1/
                         /team2/.shared-project2/
                         /team3/.shared-project3/


with something like

  namespace public {
    separator = /
    prefix = '#Public/'
    location = maildir:/courriel/boites/public
    inbox = no
    hidden = no
    list = yes
    subscriptions = yes
  }

I guess if unix right and ACL are set up correctly, other people would only see
non-selectionable '#Public'. 

The only problem is the subscription file : my understanding is that you have
only one subscription file per namespace.
Maybe unless you specify something like

  location = maildir:/courriel/boites/public:CONTROL=<some user dependent location>

But wouldn't that induce another problem : such a CONTROL directive would put
dovecot-uidlist and dovecot-keywords in the same user dependent location.

As I want to share the \Seen flag, I have to

  . put a dovecot-shared file
  . not specify INDEX (or at least, not to some user dependent location)

So I would end up with 

  . uid lists in some user dependant location (as a side effect of having several subscriptions files)
  . but indexes shared

as uid is listed in index : wouldn't that be a problem ?

thanks

--
Thomas Hummel 	    | Institut Pasteur
<hummel at pasteur.fr> | Pôle informatique - systèmes et réseau