Shared inbox?

[andy at thecsillags.com]

May 25 2015 1:01 PM, "Chris Ross" <cross+dovecot at distal.com> wrote:
> I'm running dovecot 2.2.16 on my FreeBSD mail server. I've read information on the wiki about
> setting up shared mailboxes, but I want to do something that isn't really coved by the instructions
> I was reading there. My son (now 7 years old) has an account on the system, but doesn't use it
> directly. But, for things he's interested in like Minecraft, and/or the local zoo, we have given
> out his email address in a small number of places. What I would like to set up, both for now while
> he's not actually ever reading his email himself, and perhaps even for the future when we teach
> and/or allow for that, is for my wife and I to be able to "view" his inbox from our accounts.
> 
> The instructions for setting up shared folders all are written so that they're secondary folders to
> all accounts. Is there a way to either (a) configure sharing someone elses Inbox by other accounts,
> or (b) setting up a separately configured shared folder to _act_ as the inbox for a single account?
> 
> Thanks. Any suggestions to achieve the above described end goal would be appreciated.
> 
> - Chris

I'll assume you've seen these:
http://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Shared and http://wiki2.dovecot.org/ACL

When I set them up that way, I shared the target inbox (we'll call it foo at example.com) to be accessible by user bar at example.com.  When I go into my email client, I'll see something like: shared/foo at example.com/INBOX as a folder.

To give bar@ access to foo@'s INBOX, I ran something like this:

doveadm acl add \
    -u foo at example.com \
    INBOX user=bar at example.com \
    lookup read write write-seen write-deleted insert\
    post expunge create delete admin

http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Doveadm/ACL covers the details of what all of the "lookup read..." bits and more do.

The boxes don't have to be shared publicly if you use the "private" namespace.

Hopefully that helps!

Cheers,
Drew Csillag