dovecot - Aug 2005 - dovecot + openwebmail

Hi,
I'm trying to add some sanity to a badly thought out mail system that,
for various reasons, cant be fixed from the bottom up at this moment in
time.
The system is debian sarge, exim 4.5, doing virtual domains and 
delivering into mboxes in /var/spool/virtual/$domain/$user , 
there is webmail access and this allows user to create folders in 
(dont shoot me!)
/etc/openwebmail/users/$domain/$username/mail/ , the files in this
directory appear to be mboxes in that each mail begins with a From:
line, the naming of these files is completely arbitrary.

Im trying to add imap access that would ideally give users access to the
mail in /var , and also in the openwebmail dirs, though the latter is
not essential, just desirable.

All mails are owned by user mail.

I've installed dovecot-imapd version 0.99.14-1, but if this doesnt have
the namespace additions from version 1.0-test, I can easily install
that. 
Reading the wiki, it seems I can achieve this with namespaces, something
like

namespace private {
  separator = /
  inbox = yes
  prefix = 
  location  
mbox:/etc/openwebmail/users/%d/%u/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/virtual/%d/%u
}


But, Im not quite sure where this would go in the config file, going by
the example config you can just shoehorn them into the middle of the
file, but I'm not 100% sure...

I had been trying to use things like..

default_mail_env
mbox:/var/folders/%d/%u:INBOX=/var/spool/virtual/%d/%u:INDEX=/var/indexes/%d/%n

Having created the necessary folders in /var , but I didnt have much
success (the authentication part worked straight away using my passwd
file), And having read more and been told about namespaces on the irc
channel, it seemed like I should go that way anyway.

If anyone could give me a steer in the right direction, or even tell me
i'm wasting my time (tho dont bother telling me how much better maildir
etc is, i know!)

Thanks for your time.

-- 
Pete

On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 04:03:11PM +0100, Peter McEvoy
wrote:
> I'm trying to add some sanity to a badly thought out mail system that,
> for various reasons, cant be fixed from the bottom up at this moment in
> time.
> The system is debian sarge, exim 4.5, doing virtual domains and 
> delivering into mboxes in /var/spool/virtual/$domain/$user , 
> there is webmail access and this allows user to create folders in 
> (dont shoot me!)
> /etc/openwebmail/users/$domain/$username/mail/ , the files in this
> directory appear to be mboxes in that each mail begins with a From:
> line, the naming of these files is completely arbitrary.
> 
> Im trying to add imap access that would ideally give users access to the
> mail in /var , and also in the openwebmail dirs, though the latter is
> not essential, just desirable.
> 
> All mails are owned by user mail.
> 
> I've installed dovecot-imapd version 0.99.14-1

Further to my last rambling diatribe, I've got this working with:

default_mail_env
mbox:/etc/openwebmail/users/%d/%u/mail/:INBOX=/var/spool/virtual/%d/%u:INDEX=/var/indexes/%n

any half decent imap client can see any folders in
/etc/openwebmail/users/%d/%u/mail/ , and openwebmail can see any folders
the client creates, so everyones happy.

Thanks for a great bit of software.


-- 
Pete