no mailbox associated?

[Jorey Bump]

Marten Lehmann wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>> Did you create it with
>> cm user.test at test.de
> 
> no, just with
> 
> cm test at test.de
> 
> What is the "user." for? I thought this is just a relict from

See this for an explanation:

  http://cyrusimap.web.cmu.edu/imapd/overview.html#mboxnamestd

It's a common mistake to forget the 'user.' prefix, but it is required 
in a conventional setup.

> non-virtualdomain setups? What can I use an account for if I'm not creating it
> with "user."? 

There really aren't accounts in Cyrus IMAP, just mailboxes created 
within namespaces. The notion of an account is a product of the 
authentication system (Cyrus SASL) combined with Access Control Lists. 
When an external process (like your MTA) passes a message to Cyrus for 
delivery, the form of the localpart tells Cyrus how to deliver it, and a 
simple foo at example.com gets delivered to the user.foo namespace. But a 
user that authenticates to Cyrus can have access to much more than a 
mailbox in the user namespace (and may not even have access to the user 
namespace at all!). It seems confusing at first, but it's a very 
flexible system.

Mailboxes created in the root of the namespace can be used as bulletin 
boards or shared mailboxes that appear at the same level as INBOX, not 
as a child of it (which can be further confused by the use of 
altnamespace). However, it's recommended to use the namespaces provided 
for these features so user accounts don't get cluttered with folders 
over which they have no control (if they don't use subscriptions), and 
to support delivery using specially constructed localparts in email 
addresses.

> Can I rename the account or do I have to create a new one (is
> "user." evaluated at the creation time to create a special typ of account?)?

If there is no mail in it, it is safe to delete this mailbox with cyradm 
and create a new one in the user namespace (the example assumes cyrus is 
your admin user):

  localhost> sam test cyrus c
  localhost> dm test
  localhost> cm user.test