[sclug] Mail Server silly question

[James Wyper]

Can't say I've tried this so don't know if it would work but..

IMAP mailboxes reside in the user's home directory.  Depending on the
variant of IMAP you are using (Cyrus / UW / whatever) and the mailbox
format you will either have one file in the home directory per mail
folder, or one directory per folder with one file per message inside
it.

This solution will work reasonably well for the
one-file-per-mail-folder format but not the other one.  Note also that
some mailbox formats are picky about concurrent access (the traditional
unix "mbox" format for example; the "C-Client mbx" format supported by
UW imap, which I use, can handle concurrent access OK).

Try using chgrp to put all these mail files into a group that both
users can read (and only those users), then create symbolic links
between the home directory of user B and the mail files in user A's
home directory.  (The cp command has useful options to create symbolic
links recursively, but you probably knew that).

You may want to chmod the mail files so that user A can write to them
but user B can only read them; however this * might * cause problems as
I think the IMAP server would attempt to mark messages as read when
user B opens them.

You may need to set something up that refreshes the symlinks
periodically if user A creates new mail folder files.

As I said, I really don't know if this will work or not (I can't think
why it wouldn't work with UW Imap), but it's easy (and reversible)
enough to be worth a try.  

James.

 --- Scott Rixon <scott at green-flag.com> wrote: > Hi people.....
> 
> Silly question...
> 
> I have a couple of users set up on my mail server.. It's a RedHat 9
> box
> running with IMAP. How can you give one user the permission to open
> the
> other users mail?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Scott
> 
> _______________________________________________
> sclug mailing list
> sclug at sclug.org.uk
> http://www.sclug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/sclug 

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