virtual domains question

[Ken Murchison]

Phil Howard wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 12:29:31PM -0400, Ken Murchison wrote:
> 
> | Phil Howard wrote:
> | >
> | > Cross department domain sharing.  Different departments would have
> | > their own domain names, but in some cases that sharing would go between
> | > specific people in different departments, hence different domains.
> |
> | Well, most of the code to do this is already there.  The complication
> | arises when trying to deal with users in the defaultdomain (unqualified
> | userids) and how to handle 'anyone' and 'anonymous' (how to
> | differentiate between anyone in a domain or anyone regardless of
> | domain.)
> 
> I would presume a reference to a user w/o any domain qualification would
> (or should) have the same effect as logging in w/o any domain.  Whether
> that gets mapped to an actual domain, or simply accesses name hierarchy
> that has no domain, would be a detail.
> 
> As for 'anyone' and 'anonymous' I'm not sure what to do.  I can see that
> one might assume when written w/o a domain that they apply to the same
> domain, as opposed to the default domain.


I thought about this some more while watching the golf, and I'm slowly
starting to recall more of the issues.  The biggest hurdle (as was the
case with altnamespace, unixhiersep and virtdomains) is LIST/LSUB.  If
we allow users to see mailboxes in other domains, how do these get
presented to the client?  What does the namespace look like?  Should we
make it optional? (LIST performance will suck if we have to iterate
through the entire mailbox list regardless of domain)

Adding all of the functionality mentioned above was relatively trivial
-- making it work within IMAP was the difficult part.  I'm sure other
issues will come back to me in time (I _did_ give this a lot of thought
when I was actively working on virtdomains and decided to punt).

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key--    http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp