dovecot - Oct 2013 - Login into other user's account // master user for non-master users // chroot to users.<user>

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Currently some of our organizational roles uses shared secrets (aka the 
password) to access the mail account of an organizational role, say 
"sales" for example. For one, I don't like shared secrets, for
second,
there had been some changes to shared mailboxes, I can only say "user 
sales has deleted the message at then and then". Therefore I would like to 
access the mailboxes of organizational roles with the accounts of the 
humans performing the role currently.

Using sharing and ACLs it is possible to map the mailboxes of "sales"
to
"users.sales" namespace for specific other users, actually the human
ones,
say userA and userB for example.

However, userB does not like managing identities in its MUA and refuses to 
acknowledge the messages in users.sales for various reasons. One reason 
was that userB wants to visibly separate strictly both mail accounts, the 
private messages in "userB" and the role's ones in
"sales".

Now, I came into thinking that it would be good in such case, if userB 
could authentificate as, say "sales*userB" - much like a master user -
and
ends in "sales"'s home, but with access permissions of
"userB", well, like
a chroot.


Would it be an interesting feature to add to Dovecot's core?


If I simulate "sales*userB" with password of userB and let the userdb 
return the home of sales, userB would gain "owner" privilegues of
sales
implicitly. So there seems to exist no workaround.

Kind regards,

- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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On 2013-10-18 4:31 AM, Steffen Kaiser <skdovecot at smail.inf.fh-brs.de>
wrote:
> Now, I came into thinking that it would be good in such case, if userB 
> could authentificate as, say "sales*userB" - much like a master
user -
> and ends in "sales"'s home, but with access permissions of
"userB",
> well, like a chroot.
>
>
> Would it be an interesting feature to add to Dovecot's core?
I would actually find that very useful. We have similar role based email 
accounts, and currently we have the same problem - no way to tell which 
of the users in question did what...

-- 

Best regards,

*/Charles/*

On 18.10.2013, at 11.31, Steffen Kaiser <skdovecot at smail.inf.fh-brs.de>
wrote:
> Now, I came into thinking that it would be good in such case, if userB
could authentificate as, say "sales*userB" - much like a master user -
and ends in "sales"'s home, but with access permissions of
"userB", well, like a chroot.
> 
> 
> Would it be an interesting feature to add to Dovecot's core?
> 
> 
> If I simulate "sales*userB" with password of userB and let the
userdb return the home of sales, userB would gain "owner" privilegues
of sales implicitly. So there seems to exist no workaround.
I think that?s already possible. If master user=sales and userB = login user,
the ACLs would work the way you want. The problem is how to have different
passwords for the sales master user for userA and userB. But that could be done
by e.g. a checkpassword script.