[Dovecot] Weird behaviour with multiple accounts pointing to same maildir

Bill Moran wmoran at potentialtech.com
Tue Sep 14 03:45:37 EEST 2004


I'm finding this a little strange.

I'm putting together a mail server that will (someday, hopefully) serve
a lot of email addresses for a lot of domains.

To make life easy, each account name is the full mail name ... i.e
"joe at domain.com" instead of just "joe"  Mail is stored in Maildirs,
and the user account information is all in MySQL.  Delivery is
handled by Postfix.  Everything seems nice and clean, except ...

If I create multiple accounts that all use the same Maildir for
delivery (i.e. joe_smith at domain.com, js at domain.com, js at otherdomain.com)
it seems to work well.  Except that the user can _only_ log in as
the first record in the database via IMAP.  (i.e. in the example
above, the user could log in as joe_smith at domain.com, but not the
others)  Logging in as the others does not produce any erros (that
I can find, anyway) but the user can't see his/her mail.

I'm rather stumped as to why this is happening.  Each record in the
database that points to a particular Maildir is identical except for
the userid.  In the example above, logging in as the 2nd or 3rd 
account shows folders created, but not the mail in them.

For example, the above db records would look like:
+----------------------+----------+-----------------------------+-----+-----+--------+
| userid               | password | home                        | uid | gid | active |
+----------------------+----------+-----------------------------+-----+-----+--------+
| joe_smith at domain.com | ???????? | /mail/domain.com/joe_smith/ | 125 | 125 | Y      |
| js at domain.com        | ???????? | /mail/domain.com/joe_smith/ | 125 | 125 | Y      |
| js at otherdomain.com   | ???????? | /mail/domain.com/joe_smith/ | 125 | 125 | Y      |

I'm assuming this is some sort of bug, but if I'm wrong, please
correct me.  Any ideas?

Using Dovecot dovecot-0.99.10.9 on FreeBSD 4.10, talking to
mysql-server-4.0.20.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com



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