[Dovecot] Dovecot shared folder woes

[Dave Hatton]

Hi

I'm new to Dovecot so please be gentle with me. I did a search through the
list archives but couldn't quite work out my problem.

I have Dovecot installed and running and I can connect to it from my email
clients (Outlook and Evolution) ... so looking good so far.

I would like to setup three types (groups?) of mail store 

1. A per user - e.g. Fred, Harry, Betty. (For my purposes they all have Unix
Accounts on the mail server) 2. A public store which can contain folders
that may be read and written to by any user who is authenticated 3. A per
group store (e.g. accounts, sales, marketing) that may be read and written
to by any user who is authenticated and is in the specified group

Firstly, should this be possible with Dovecot?


I have tried the following dovecot.conf parameters which I thought should do
the trick ...

--------------------- cut ------------------------- ### this should give
each user a mail store default_mail_env = maildir:/var/mail/%lu/%u/Maildir

### Create Public mail store
namespace public {
   separator = /
   prefix    = Public/
   location  = /var/mail/public
   inbox     = no
   hidden    = no
}

### Create mail store for accounts
namespace shared {
   separator = /
   prefix    = Accounts/
   location  = /var/mail/accounts
   inbox     = no
   hidden    = no
}

### Create mail store for sales
namespace shared {
   separator = /
   prefix    = Sales/
   location  = /var/mail/sales
   inbox     = no
   hidden    = no
}
--------------------- cut -------------------------

I then:
1. created the directories /var/mail/{public,accounts,sales} 2. chgrp each
one to a group (public,accounts,sales respectively) 3. chmod 770 each one 4.
created a dovecot-shared in each one - chgrp and chmod appropriately

And then restarted the server

Now my problem
   When I try to connect from a client it fails and the tcp/ip connection
dies
   When I look in /var/log/mail I see and error 89 (which I understand is a
generic error) and
   IMAP(fred): Failed to create storage for 'Public/' with data:
/var/mail/public

What and I doing wrong?

TIA

Daveh