[Dovecot] Providing shared folders with multiple backend servers

[Sven Hartge]

Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> On 9.1.2012, at 22.13, Sven Hartge wrote:
>> Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
>>> On 9.1.2012, at 21.45, Sven Hartge wrote:
 
>>>>>> |   location = imapc:~/imapc-shared
>>>> 
>>>> What is the syntax of this location? What does "imapc-shared" do in
>>>> this case?
>> 
>>> It's the directory for index files. The backend IMAP server is used
>>> as a rather dummy storage, so if for example you do a FETCH 1:*
>>> BODYSTRUCTURE command, all of the message bodies are downloaded to
>>> the user's Dovecot server which parses them. But with indexes this
>>> is done only once (same as with any other mailbox format). If you
>>> want SEARCH BODY to be fast, you'd also need to use some kind of
>>> full text search indexes.
>> 
>>> If your users share the same UID (or 0666 mode would probably work
>>> too), you could share the index files rather than make them
>>> per-user.  Then you could use imapc:/shared/imapc or something.
 
>> Hmm. Yes, this is a fully virtual setup, every users mail is owned by
>> the virtmail user. Does this sharing of index files have any security
>> or privacy issues?

> There are no privacy issues, at least currently, since there is no
> per-user data. If you had wanted per-user flags this wouldn't have
> worked.

OK. I think I will go with the per-user index files for now and pay the
extra in bandwidth and processing power needed.

All in all, of 10,000 users, only about 100 use shared folders.

Grüße,
Sven.

-- 
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.