Does dovecot support shared folders, maildir style?
I've set it up, using the maildirmake from debian maildrop to create
folders. I have a number of as-yet unresolved issues, so I haven't been
able to test with many clients. It's interesting that dovecot manages to
present folders as siblings (rather than children) of INBOX. But mutt, at
least, doesn't seem to see the shared maildir (created per instructions in
the maildirmake man page).
I find in the debian archives that courier is unable to see messages delivered
to new in a shared maildir. This doesn't seem to be the same set of
symptoms, though. It appears, instead, that dovecot isn't recognizing (and
then advertising) the shared-maildirs file (a text file that describes the name
and the location). Is that the case? I don't think it's a high
priority, mind, just wondering.
Another question: can the dovecot distribution include a maildirmake utility?
The documentation is pretty blunt about the significant advantages of maildirs,
but one has to go to the courier distribution to find a utility to pre-create
these (which dovecot seems to want, since it's recognizing the mail type by
looking for the dir). This is most significant when setting up new users, of
course. Possibly this is inappropriate, and I should instead ask the debian
package maintainer to 'recommend' or 'suggest' the maildrop
package in order to get the required utility.
Nice stuff, though. I really like the ease of administration; dovecot looks to
me like a sort of equivalent to postfix, for IMAP instead of SMTP. A request
for the website: perhaps developers could supply information on clients used
with the server, and what oddities are encountered? I know that IMAP client
support is spotty, at best (for instance, I can't find a client that can do
digest-md5; mutt is supposedly capable, but my installation doesn't even
admit that that's a valid authenticator). This is partly significant
because setting up a system that uses options for which there is little or no
client support is, perhaps, an exercise in futility.
Amy!
--
Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.com
Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to
others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what
you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
-- The Duchess [Lewis Carroll]
On Fri, 2003-01-03 at 04:07, Amelia A.Lewis wrote:> Does dovecot support shared folders, maildir style?No shared folder support yet, sorry.> It's interesting that dovecot manages to present folders as siblings > (rather than children) of INBOX.Yeah, I got annoyed at that with Courier. It was probably done so that there would be a completely private namespace for the user, but I don't think it's that bad to reserve a couple of folder names to specify shared namespaces. Although I'll probably make it optional to specify a separate namespace for private folders too.> Another question: can the dovecot distribution include a maildirmake > utility?Well, maybe. It might confuse people though, since Dovecot doesn't yet support shared folders and quota. Also Dovecot itself doesn't really care about the contents of maildir, it's enough to simply create ~/Maildir and Dovecot creates the missing folders. qmail and others might not do that though.> Nice stuff, though. I really like the ease of administration; dovecot > looks to me like a sort of equivalent to postfix, for IMAP instead of > SMTP.I'm trying to make it fool proof :)> A request for the website: perhaps developers could supply > information on clients used with the server, and what oddities are > encountered?Yes, I guess I could. I haven't found many oddities yet though.> I know that IMAP client support is spotty, at best (for instance, I > can't find a client that can do digest-md5; mutt is supposedly > capable, but my installation doesn't even admit that that's a valid > authenticator). This is partly significant because setting up a > system that uses options for which there is little or no client > support is, perhaps, an exercise in futility.Evolution can do digest-md5 and I'm using it all the time. mutt uses Cyrus SASL library, so you'll have to install libsasl-digestmd5-plain in Debian. Except it doesn't seem to like Dovecot's implementation, have to fix..
On Thu, 2 Jan 2003, Amelia A.Lewis wrote:> Another question: can the dovecot distribution include a maildirmake > utility? The documentation is pretty blunt about the significant > advantages of maildirs, but one has to go to the courier distribution to > find a utility to pre-create these (which dovecot seems to want, since > it's recognizing the mail type by looking for the dir). This is most > significant when setting up new users, of course. Possibly this is > inappropriate, and I should instead ask the debian package maintainer to > 'recommend' or 'suggest' the maildrop package in order to get the > required utility. >Good thing I checked this list before I made the 0.99.5 packages. rather than depend on another package, i'm going to include the following script as /usr/bin/maildirmake.dovecot (to avoid treading on the others.) #!/bin/sh # # maildirmake.dovecot -- create maildirs # Copyright (c) 2003, Jaldhar H. Vyas # "Do what thou wilt" shall be the whole of the license. # dir=$1 if [ -z "$dir" ]; then echo "Must supply a directory path" exit 1 fi if [ "$dir" = "-h" ]; then echo "usage: $0 directory" exit 0 fi umask 077 mkdir -p $dir/{cur,new,tmp} || echo "$!" && exit 1 chmod u+rwxg-a- $dir $dir/{cur,new,tmp} || echo "$!" && exit 1 exit 0 If Timo wants to borrow this, he is welcome to it. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <jaldhar at debian.org>