Hey all,

So I've got a shared namespace in dovecot where users can, via a custom control panel, share their folders into (which creates a symlink) in order to allow anyone on their domain to access it. I store mail in maildir.

The issue is that when people share folders, they expect that when they make subfolders, those are automatically shared as they are contained within it.

According to the Maildir++ specification, "Can folders have subfolders, defined in a recursive fashion? The answer is no. If you want to have a client with a hierarchy of folders, emulate it. Pick a hierarchy separator character, say ":". Then, folder foo/bar is subdirectory .foo:bar." It says some other stupid things too though that nobody seems to actually follow, and I've never actually seen anything but a '.' used as the delimiter...

The same is true in IMAPdir: "As with Maildir++, submailboxes can not be represented in a recursive fashion in the file system. The mailbox' representation name will contain the soft hierarchy delimiter character dot '.', and all mailboxes must reside in the same root level directory."

I don't understand the reasoning behind avoiding recursion, honestly. If somebody wants to enlighten me on that one, it would be appreciated.

i.e. instead of:

.Folder/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder.SubFolder1/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder.SubFolder1.foo/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder.SubFolder1.bar/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder.SubFolder2/{cur,new,tmp}

We'd have:

.Folder/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder/.SubFolder1/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder/.SubFolder1/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder/.SubFolder1/.foo/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder/.SubFolder1/.bar/{cur,new,tmp}
.Folder/.SubFolder2/{cur,new,tmp}

That would both solve my issue and be a lot more convenient when browsing/scripting around maildirs (i.e. "cd ../.foo" vs "cd ../.Folder.Subfolder1.foo").

It seems to me that this would be a really easy thing to add support for via the config option used to choose between maildir/mbox/dbox. Call it rmaildir or somesuch...

Thoughts?

Cheers,
--
Casey Allen Shobe | mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://casey.shobe.info
SeattleServer.com, inc. | http://seattleserver.com

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