[Dovecot] Shared Mailboxes, Per User SEEN flag and Mailing lists

[Ted Strzalkowski]

Now, correct me if I'm wrong.  Although the symlink option would work,
wouldn't he have to run Dovecot rootless then?  And I believe that is a
security risk then, no?

Public folders should be a bit easier than symlinks which seems to be quite
a kludge.  I have experience with the public folders in MS Exchange, but not
in IMAP or anything.  It has to be possible without a kludge.  But, then
again, I'm probably wrong.

TedSki


Peter Fern wrote:
> 
> Are you familiar with symlinking/hardlinking under unix?  If 
> not, it's 
> fairly straight forward, and yes - they are like file aliases.  I 
> suggest you google for it to see how it works, or 'man ln'.  
> You'll need 
> to understand this to make the solution below work.
> 
> For your scenario, linking individual files into user's mailboxes 
> probably isn't the best method - better to use the inbuilt 
> shared folder 
> support in dovecot.  There are two methods of provisioning shared 
> mailboxes in dovecot - using the namespace configuration 
> directives, or 
> symlinking the folders in.  The namespace method will make shared 
> folders available to *all* mail users, so if you want 
> opt-in/-out you'll 
> need to use the symlink method, so for your setup, this would be the 
> easiest method.
> 
> A quick outline on how to make this happen:
> 
> 1.  Create a central store somewhere containing your folders 
> to be shared.
> eg:
> /var/mail/public/.MySQL
> /var/mail/public/.PostgreSQL
> etc...
> 2.  In each of these folders create a file called 
> 'dovecot-shared' and 
> set file permissions to 0644 and set the group to one that your mail 
> users will be members of - this will determine the 
> permissions of mails 
> within the folder.
> 3.  When a user signs up to the folder, create a symlink to 
> the relevant 
> folder under the user's maildir.
> 
> Then just drop mails into these maildirs.  This is all a little 
> off-the-cuff, so if anyone disagrees yell out.
> 
> Cheers,
> Pete
> 
[SNIP]