On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 09:45 +0100, Michal Soltys wrote:

After looking through wiki/config/list I'm still not sure, what exactly is the difference between those two. Even all the examples in dovecot's wiki don't have a single "namespace shared" anywhere. And there's only short mention about the difference in dovecot.conf .

Peeking into rfc2342 - would shared namespace relate to "Other Users' Namespace(s)" and public namespace to "Shared Namespace(s)" ?

Does perhaps the difference only lie on the client side, depending on the namespace it's asking, while functionally it's the same from the perspective of dovecot ?

Shared namespace is about getting access to other users' messages. Public namespace is about getting access to .. well .. public mailboxes, or mailboxes that were made shared by sysadmin. In any case not other users' mailboxes.

Dovecot before v1.2 makes no difference between shared and public namespaces. The next v1.2 release finally supports users' shared mailboxes so there's a big difference between handling shared and public namespaces.

I've no idea if clients treat shared and public namespaces differently.