dovecot - Oct 2010 - Can you POP a specific folder in Dovecot?

Hi all,

I am in the middle of migrating from an old, Windows based 
mailserver, and have run into a small challenge I hope someone here 
can help me with.

In my old setup, a user could have folders on the server, and by 
using his login with the mailbox appended, could pop a given folder 
specifically.

For instance, logging in with user at example.com would pop INBOX, and 
logging in with user-folder at example.com would pop just that specific folder.

Is it possible to do something like this in Dovecot, or is the only 
possible way of popping folders by using the virtual plugin?



Med Venlig Hilsen,

Peter Reinhold,  peter at reinhold.dk / peter at geekhouse.dk

On 28.10.2010, at 12.26, Peter Reinhold wrote:
> For instance, logging in with user at example.com would pop INBOX, and
logging in with user-folder at example.com would pop just that specific folder.
Might be possible.. Assuming you're using Maildir?

First you'll need to extract the folder from the username in passdb and
change the username to user at example.com. Put the folder into userdb_folder or
something, so that you can access it in post-login script. The post-login script
then would do something like:

if [ "$FOLDER" != "" ]; then
  MAIL=maildir:$HOME/Maildir/.$FOLDER
fi

Probably needs some more complexity, but basically I think that idea should
work.

On 28/10/2010 11:26, Peter Reinhold wrote:
> In my old setup, a user could have folders on the server, and by using 
> his login with the mailbox appended, could pop a given folder 
> specifically.
>
> For instance, logging in with user at example.com would pop INBOX, and 
> logging in with user-folder at example.com would pop just that specific 
> folder.
>
> Is it possible to do something like this in Dovecot, or is the only 
> possible way of popping folders by using the virtual plugin?
Though this is of course "Paradigm error" or "Trying to ice-skate
up hill".

If you want to access folders, then use IMAP.

Historically IMAP has difficult, slow, unreliable and generally gnarly.

But nowadays Dovecot makes IMAP work well.

Of course you have to pick the right client. I've never had good 
experiences with MS-Outlook over IMAP, but then I haven't even bothered 
with it for several years. My current favourite is Thunderbird 3.

Bill