OT Shared Imap folders/accounts

[Gareth]

Because it maintains read status for each user you will find if you give
people their own email accounts and give them access to the shared
folder then when one person reads the mail it will still show as unread
for other users. Hence why the normal thing to do is create a subfolder
people can drag the mail to when it has been dealt with.

As far as installing it you will find that cyrus stores the mail as
individual files within /var/spool/imap together with 2 or 3 index
files. There is also a master database of all the mailbox folders on the
system together with permissions.

The upside of this is that it is very memory and processor efficient and
can scale to a very large number of users. However it does make
importing mails a bit of a pain.
Having both IMAP servers installed on different ports and using
Outloot/Thunderbird to move the mails between then is what I did the
last time but there may well be automated scripts you can use if you
have more users than I did.

On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 15:30, Steve Campbell wrote:
> Gareth wrote:
> > I second the suggestion of using Cyrus.
> >
> > The only slight difference you will see is that Cyrus will maintain the
> > read status for each user individually so you will need to get people to
> > move emails to subdirectories when they have dealt with them.
> >
> > On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 14:58, Julian Field wrote:
> >   
> >> A better IMAP server, such as cyrus-imapd, can do this for you with no 
> >> problems. I use it here and have several shared IMAP mailboxes with no 
> >> problems at all.
> >>
> >> Even Exchange could do this for you :)
> >>
> >> What are you trying to use at the moment?
> >>
> >> Steve Campbell wrote:
> >>     
> >>> Not the place to ask, I'm sure, but maybe someone can point me to the 
> >>> proper place or page.
> >>>
> >>> I've googled a while, and only became more confused, as what I'd like 
> >>> to do is not techically a shared Imap account. What I've seen so far 
> >>> is that an email account is set up with different users being able to 
> >>> access this account. The "shared" part comes from a mailbox permission 
> >>> of 1777 and/or group rights.
> >>>
> >>> The policy here, for as long as I can remember, is to have one IMAP 
> >>> account and everyone access it with the same username and password. 
> >>> This causes corruption, as you might guess.
> >>>
> >>> Is it truly just file permissions or group access to a mailbox, or 
> >>> where should I turn to see the other magic that makes this work? I use 
> >>> a standard Centos 3 install.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks, and sorry for the bother of OT.
> >>>
> >>> Steve Campbell
> >>>
> >>>       
> >> Jules
> >>
> >>     
> >
> When you say "move them to subdirectories", does that mean they need to 
> manually deal with this, or does it do it for them and they just need to 
> get used to the difference.
> 
> I'll review the cyrus pages, but does anyone have experience in removing 
> whatever I have and installing cyrus? I haven't searched yet for rpms, 
> but imagine I'd do a rpm -e for the current.
> 
> The nice thing about the one installed by default is it works out of the 
> package, even with our horde/imp install, so I'd need to tread lightly 
> to keep the natives from getting upset.
> 
> I'm guessing from both of the replies that there is more to shared 
> accounts than just permissions, then?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> steve