Non-personal users

[Joseph Brennan]

We are converting to Cyrus later this year.

We're currently trying to figure out how to organize non-personal
mailboxes.  Many departments and divisions like to have incoming
mailboxes for official mail to the unit, and we'd like to keep that
separate from any one user's mailbox.

They usually ask for a user account and want to share the password.
But as a single user, they'd not be able to track what each person
has seen, and any person could delete and expunge.  This might
possibly work for two or three people sharing a job duty, where
essentially as long as one of them has seen and acted on a message,
the others don't need to see it.

But in many cases what they really want to do is direct mail for
some project or function to its own mailbox, and then get everyone
to be able to read all the messages.  So sharing with acl's is more
appropriate.

It seems like we'd want to set up a base mailbox per department,
and set acl's so that some few people per department can manage
a tree starting there.  These few would be able to move messages
around, delete and expunge, create and destroy sub-mailboxes, etc.
We'd like to make it easy for each unit to manipulate this and not
have to submit a request to us.

Is it better to do this in "user." space or public folder space?
We can see pros and cons to each, but we have no experience to draw
on.  What is actually being done on Cyrus systems, and how well
does it work?

Joseph Brennan
Academic Technologies Group, Academic Information Systems (AcIS)
Columbia University in the City of New York



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