dovecot - Apr 2005 - Shared mailboxes and accessing MailDir not through IMAP

Hello,

I'm testing Dovecot that is part of Debian/sarge (v0.99.14-1).
So far so good. I have migrated some mailboxes for testing with success 
and seems that everything works fine.

One thing I do not figure out is, what to do about shared mailboxes, which 
are the very reason of searching for an alternative IMAP server,

The Wiki states that there is some sort of shared mailboxes, based upon 
symlinks. Well, but since which version actually?? The Changelog stops at 
2003-11-08 21:12 ?

What I need is a mailbox (maildir) for a contact address (not a real 
shared mailbox, but several users shall be able to read a mail and delete 
it after processing). For this, one needs write permission to the mails 
therein only, the MDA takes care of to make the mails readable for the 
group. It would be good to see, if somebody had answered a mail already, 
but that's not required.

What I tried is this:

I setup all Unix-permissions of the folders (. cur new tmp: u=rwx,g=srwx) 
and their parents (u=rwx,g=x).
Then I placed a symlink into the maildir of all users.
Each user caches the INDEXes into an individual /var/ directory, not in 
the maildirs themselves. (BTW: I wonder why I need to give the group write 
permission to the base directory '.').

The mailbox shows up and is read-write.

Now I wonder, what impact I'm to expect here? Esp. "The only problem is
that currently everyone's message flags would be shared as well."
(quote from a message of a thread taken from the Wiki)

Then there is http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2003-March/001113.html
the third item will apply to my situation, I guess.
MailDir is (sort of) expected to be read by mutt directly, for instance. 
Because the mailboxes are located within the users home directories, some 
of them do this.
Do this item mean that Dovecot is NOT expecting that mails are deleted in 
any other way than through itself? Otherwise Dovecot would find a change 
in the mailbox and rebuilt the index file regardless whether the change 
had been originated by another IMAP client or by directly manipulating the 
maildir.

Bye,

-- 
Steffen Kaiser

On Tue, 2005-04-26 at 09:53 +0200, Steffen Kaiser wrote:
> I'm testing Dovecot that is part of Debian/sarge (v0.99.14-1).
> So far so good. I have migrated some mailboxes for testing with success 
> and seems that everything works fine.
> 
> One thing I do not figure out is, what to do about shared mailboxes, which 
> are the very reason of searching for an alternative IMAP server,
> 
> The Wiki states that there is some sort of shared mailboxes, based upon 
> symlinks. Well, but since which version actually?? The Changelog stops at 
> 2003-11-08 21:12 ?
It requires 1.0-stable releases. With 0.99.x only way to have "shared
mailboxes" is to have a shared userid under which people log in to read
the mail.

The problem with 0.99.x is that all files that are created will have
mode 0600, so only the user who created the file is able to read them.
Even if users don't create new mail files, they'll still need to update
dovecot-uidlist file.
> I setup all Unix-permissions of the folders (. cur new tmp: u=rwx,g=srwx) 
> and their parents (u=rwx,g=x).
> Then I placed a symlink into the maildir of all users.
> Each user caches the INDEXes into an individual /var/ directory, not in 
> the maildirs themselves. (BTW: I wonder why I need to give the group write 
> permission to the base directory '.').
Because dovecot-uidlist is created there.
> Now I wonder, what impact I'm to expect here? Esp. "The only
problem is
> that currently everyone's message flags would be shared as well."
> (quote from a message of a thread taken from the Wiki)
Actually with 1.0-stable the Seen-flag is per-user private, other flags
are shared (ie. if one user set Replied-flag, others will see it too).
> Then there is http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2003-March/001113.html
> the third item will apply to my situation, I guess.
> MailDir is (sort of) expected to be read by mutt directly, for instance. 
That mail is really old. The maildir code has long since been fixed to
work transparently with external changes.

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On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 01:28 +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
[...]
> It requires 1.0-stable releases. With 0.99.x only way to have "shared
> mailboxes" is to have a shared userid under which people log in to
read
> the mail.
[...]

I'm still new to dovecot and IMAP/Maildir in general so this may be
obvious but I have to ask anyway.
>From the above I gather that it is safe for multiple users to log in
using the same userid and reading/sending/... mail concurrently?

I'm using 0.99.14 on debian testing with maildir folders and I would
like to allow my girlfriend to read my mail as well as hers and vice
versa. My mail would be stored in /home/my_userid/Maildir and hers
in /home/her_userid/Maildir on the same machine.

TIA

Bram
-- 
# Mertens Bram "M8ram"   <bram-mertens at linux.be>   Linux User
#349737 #
# debian testing            kernel 2.6.8-1-686     i686     512MB RAM #
# 10:20:33 up 32 days, 16:34, 14 users,  load average: 0.96, 0.57, 0.34 #