Different users having same home/mail_location?

[Tapio Sokura]

Hello Peter,

I'm using a virtual users model in dovecot where all the mail is stored 
under the same OS user account anyway, so file/dir permissions won't be 
a problem. The system users I was referring to are actually completely 
separate user accounts at the moment with their own uid/gid (and 
passwordless sudo between them), but I guess they could use same uid/gid 
and just have separate entries in passwd/shadow.

Anyway at the moment I'm not concerned about getting the authentication 
part working, but whether there's something in dovecot that will bite my 
sitting muscles if mail_location is the same for two users. I'm aware of 
the shared folders functionality mentioned by Marcus and that will 
probably be my fallback, if sharing a mail_location is not viable. Same 
mail_location would just be simpler.

   Tapio

On 24.9.2017 0:34, Peter Chiochetti wrote:
> Hello Tapia,
> 
> You are going to great lengths :) I assume, that PAM working means, 
> "user" and "otheruser" are the names of system-users with the same uid, 
> home etc? Then I do not see, why dovecot, all defaults and 
> authenticating against PAM won't work out of the box, shouldn't it?
> 
> Peter
> 
> Am 2017-09-23 um 22:08 schrieb Tapio Sokura:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Will I be breaking something if I have two users share the same home 
>> and/or mail_location (maildir format) in dovecot? Mail will only be 
>> delivered to the primary user, the other would be used every now and 
>> then to login via imap (webmail).
>>
>> This would be on a CentOS 7 box running dovecot from the packaging 
>> system, i.e. dovecot-2.2.10-8.el7 currently. The reason I'd like to do 
>> this is to have two ways to login to the same mailbox, one using 
>> username + password and the other otherusername + otherpassword + 
>> otp-token. Basically this "otherusername" would be for cases where I 
>> don't trust the client computer to not have a keylogger etc badness in 
>> it, but still need to see my mail.
>>
>> I have this kind of a dual-login setup via PAM for regular system user 
>> authentication and it's working ok. I'm just wondering about the 
>> dovecot part, whether dovecot will do Unexpected Things if more than 
>> one user have the same home and mail_location? If it makes any 
>> difference, the users can have separate homes, but the mailbox should 
>> be the same for usability.
>>
>>    Tapio