[Dovecot] Glued-together private namespaces

[Mark Moseley]

I've been goofing with this all day with 2.0.15 and I'm starting to
realize that either a) I'm not that smart, b) it's been so long since
I messed with namespaces that I'm going about it completely wrong, or
c) it's just not possible. I haven't posted 'doveconf -n' and other
details, because mainly I'm just looking for 'yes, this is possible'
or 'no, you're smoking crack' before posting further details. At this
point, it's all maildir and moving to mdbox, while highly desirable in
the future, is not possible in the near- to medium-term.

I'm trying to glue a namespace underneath INBOX:

namespace INBOX {
        type = private
        separator = .
        prefix = INBOX.    # Yes, this used to be on Courier
        inbox = yes
        list = yes
        hidden = no
        subscriptions = yes
        location = maildir:~/Maildir
}
namespace archive {
        type = private
        separator = .
        prefix = INBOX.Archives.
        inbox = no
        list = children
        subscriptions = yes
        location = maildir:~/Maildir-Archive
}


I've tried putting namespace archive's 'prefix' as just "Archives",
but Tbird doesn't seem to see this namespace, regardless of how much I
futz with the imap settings in tbird.

With the above setup, it actually seems to work correctly (provided
~/Maildir-Archive exists), though I'm sure a big gotcha is waiting in
the wings. I can move messages around, create subfolders, subscribe to
folders in ~/Maildir-Archive). The only thing I can't seem to get
working is quotas. With my password_query like:

password_query = ...
CONCAT( '*:bytes=', "1M" ) AS 'userdb_quota_rule', \
CONCAT( '*:messages=10' ) AS 'userdb_quota_rule2', \
CONCAT( 'INBOX.Archives:bytes=+4900M' ) AS 'userdb_quota_rule3', \
CONCAT( 'INBOX.Archives:messages=+3900' ) AS 'userdb_quota_rule4'
...

only the default quota seems to be in place for any subfolder of
INBOX.Archives and for INBOX.Archives itself, i.e. *:bytes still
applies to INBOX.Archives. The debug log show that:

Debug: Quota root: name=User quota backend=maildir args=
Debug: Quota rule: root=User quota mailbox=* bytes=1048576 messages=0
Debug: Quota rule: root=User quota mailbox=* bytes=1048576 messages=10
Debug: Quota rule: root=User quota mailbox=INBOX.Archives
bytes=+5138022400 messages=0
Debug: Quota rule: root=User quota mailbox=INBOX.Archives
bytes=+5138022400 messages=+3900

These are wildly stupid quotas but they're just there to test. With
INBOX already at capacity (byte-wise; only set to a meg), copying
large messages inside INBOX.Archives fails (only copying a 800k
message but the quota should be 5gig now).

Again, before I post configs, I'm just curious if what I'm trying to
do isn't remotely possible, or that I'm approaching this entirely
wrongly. Thanks!