dovecot - Oct 2012 - Marking all mail in one folder of public mailbox as read

Hi,

I'm running Dovecot 1.2.17 on FreeBSD 9 to serve an archive of a few 
internal mailinglists. The archive is implemented using a public namespace:

namespace private {
   separator = /
   prefix    inbox = yes
}

namespace public {
   separator = /
   prefix = Lists/
   location = 
maildir:/home/vmail/lists/Maildir:CONTROL=~/Maildir/lists:INDEX=~/Maildir/lists
   subscriptions = no
}

As you can see, the CONTROL/INDEX files are stored per-user to allow 
private \Seen flags. The different mailinglists are all sent to the 
'lists' user which has a Sieve script to file them into different 
folders, so I have directories on my harddisk like

   /home/vmail/lists/Maildir/.somelist
   /home/vmail/lists/Maildir/.anotherlist

Now, I'd like to mark the mail in *one* of those folders as \Seen by 
default. If the INDEX files weren't per-user, it would simply be a 
matter of using 'addflag "\Seen";' in the Sieve script of the
lists
user. Alas, this has no effect.

Hence my question - how can I have the mail of just one mailinglist get 
marked as "read" for all users?

So far, the only option I see is to add a second public namespace, with 
a different prefix - and this namespace doesn't use private 
CONTROL/INDEX files. However, I'd like to keep using the "Lists"
prefix
if possible to avoid too many changes to the clients.

-- 
Frerich Raabe - raabe at froglogic.com
www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing

On 17.10.2012, at 15.44, Frerich Raabe wrote:
> I'm running Dovecot 1.2.17 on FreeBSD 9 to serve an archive of a few
internal mailinglists. The archive is implemented using a public namespace:
> 
> namespace private {
>  separator = /
>  prefix >  inbox = yes
> }
> 
> namespace public {
>  separator = /
>  prefix = Lists/
>  location =
maildir:/home/vmail/lists/Maildir:CONTROL=~/Maildir/lists:INDEX=~/Maildir/lists
>  subscriptions = no
> }
> 
> As you can see, the CONTROL/INDEX files are stored per-user to allow
private \Seen flags. The different mailinglists are all sent to the
'lists' user which has a Sieve script to file them into different
folders, so I have directories on my harddisk like
> 
>  /home/vmail/lists/Maildir/.somelist
>  /home/vmail/lists/Maildir/.anotherlist
> 
> Now, I'd like to mark the mail in *one* of those folders as \Seen by
default. If the INDEX files weren't per-user, it would simply be a matter of
using 'addflag "\Seen";' in the Sieve script of the lists
user. Alas, this has no effect.
> 
> Hence my question - how can I have the mail of just one mailinglist get
marked as "read" for all users?
You can't with the above settings. It would require writing the seen flag to
all users' index files. Not easy to do and definitely not efficient to do.
Maybe if there was some kind of a mixed hybrid of accepting seen flag changes
from the shared index, but no such code exists (also private/shared index
separation doesn't exist before v2.2).
> So far, the only option I see is to add a second public namespace, with a
different prefix - and this namespace doesn't use private CONTROL/INDEX
files. However, I'd like to keep using the "Lists" prefix if
possible to avoid too many changes to the clients.
Use:

prefix=Lists/anotherlist/
location = maildir:/home/vmail/lists/sharedseen/Maildir

Then deliver the mails to /home/vmail/lists/sharedseen/Maildir root directly. Of
course this means that you need to create a namespace for each such list.

Alternative would be to use prefix=Lists/sharedseen/ and create lists under it.

Am 10/18/2012 5:31 AM, schrieb Timo Sirainen:
> Use:
>
> prefix=Lists/anotherlist/
> location = maildir:/home/vmail/lists/sharedseen/Maildir
>
> Then deliver the mails to /home/vmail/lists/sharedseen/Maildir root
directly. Of course this means that you need to create a namespace for each such
list.
>
> Alternative would be to use prefix=Lists/sharedseen/ and create lists under
it.
Thanks, the second version is basically what I did! I added a new namespace

namespace public {
   separator = /
   prefix = Lists/Archive/
   location = maildir:/home/vmail/lists/archive/Maildir
   subscriptions = no
}

...and then had my Sieve script fileinto that. Works fine! Thanks for 
your help!

-- 
Frerich Raabe - raabe at froglogic.com
www.froglogic.com - Multi-Platform GUI Testing