dovecot - Aug 2008 - Option to evaluate IMAP prefixes relative to $HOME, rather than the IMAP root?

Greetings,

Is there a mechanism (or relatively small source-code change) which would cause
Dovecot to evaluate IMAP prefixes relative to $HOME rather than the configured
IMAP root?

 * * *

Background:

We're currently migrating from a WU-IMAP mailserver configuration which
stores
user mail in a global NFS-exported $HOME, and we've run into well-known
issues
handling client-specified IMAP prefixes.

If a user specifies an IMAP prefix, Dovecot evaluates the path given relative to
the  IMAP root path specified in mail_location, rather than resolving it
relative to the user's home directory as our old WU-IMAP installation would
do.

(For example: if a user has been keeping their mail in $HOME/foobar, and
mail_location's folder path is set to %h/mail, then when that user comes to
retrieve their mail with an IMAP prefix set to "~/foobar", then
Dovecot will
attempt to return the contents of the folder $HOME/mail/~/foobar -- which
doesn't exist -- rather than $HOME/foobar.)

At the moment, we have several hidden namespaces set up to support various
common user-side variations -- "mail/", "Mail/",
"~/Mail/", etc. -- each with a
different custom mail_location string.

Whilst this works for these common cases, it's fairly ugly, and results in
extra
empty directories appearing in users' $HOME.

If there was some mechanism for telling Dovecot to evaluate IMAP prefixes
relative to $HOME rather than the mail folder root specified in mail_location,
that would provide us with a much neater and general-purpose solution.

(I was hoping that setting full_filesystem_access=yes would do this, but it only
relaxes the normal access permissions.)

Cheers,
David
-- 
David McBride <dwm at tastycake.net>

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On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 17:06 +0100, David McBride wrote:
> Is there a mechanism (or relatively small source-code change) which would
cause
> Dovecot to evaluate IMAP prefixes relative to $HOME rather than the
configured
> IMAP root?
It's not really possible to know which part of the string is the IMAP
prefix and which part is a normal mailbox path. For example user could
just as well have created a mailbox called "mail/foo" and then you
shouldn't treat it as plain "foo". So the only way would be to set
mail_location to point to your home directory.
> (I was hoping that setting full_filesystem_access=yes would do this, but it
only
> relaxes the normal access permissions.)
You didn't mention which Dovecot version you were using or if you're
using mbox or maildir, but looks like that setting was broken at least
with v1.1. Fixed for mbox (not for maildir yet):
http://hg.dovecot.org/dovecot-1.1/rev/c1e022104285

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