Captive mailbox in Cyrus IMAP?

[Nik Conwell]

On Nov 21, 2006, at 11:12 AM, Mike wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Nov 2006, Nik Conwell might have said:
>
>> We're currently using UW IMAP and have previously implemented a hack
>> whereby accounts (based on shell name) are designated captive.  For
>> these accounts, any SELECT of any folder is overridden to SELECT a
>> read-only shared mailbox with a single e-mail that tells them they're
>> captive and what they need to do to get out of the situation.  To the
>> client it looks like you've lost all your e-mail and you only have a
>> single message.  In reality, the e-mail is still there and delivery
>> continues to work.  Getting them back to their normal mailboxes is a
>> quick/easy operation.
>>
>> Is there any way to do a similar thing in Cyrus IMAP?  I'm not
>> against coding it but I wanted to see if there was a conventional way
>> of doing this first.
>
> Why do you do this?

Archiving accounts after people graduate and leave the university.   
We send people a bunch of e-mails letting them know they're being  
archived but often they're ignored.  We still do this, but then  
before archiving we put them into a captive state for a couple of  
weeks.  Having only 1 e-mail in your inbox makes it painfully obvious  
that things are indeed going away.  At that point people can request  
an extension, register for a class, etc and we can turn the account  
back on.  We could just disable the account and/or password, but  
having an e-mail explaining things sits better than an "Invalid  
login" error message.  Having this extra captive step also saves us  
from the pain of restoring the account again in the near future.