auto create / subscribe folder patches

[Simon Walter]

Hi all,

I've been digging into the possibility of auto creation of INBOX and 
maybe other folders. All I find for Cyrus is patches.

May I suggest putting these into the source tree? They're optional 
settings. So those who don't like them, don't need to use the feature. 
Not everyone complies their mail servers. I like to use packages for 
example. Yes, it will take a long time to make it downstream, but it's 
been discussed on this mailing list for over 10 years.

I see this kind of reasoning:
<quote>
    Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 11:16:41 -0800 (PST)
    From: Jonathan Marsden <jonathan at bach.xc.org>
[...]
    The name of the option is potentially confusing, in that the desired
    mailbox is not 100% *automatically* created.  Rather, it is only
    created when the new user logs in and issues a CREATE INBOX command.
    I initially thought the INBOX would be created at login.

Right, it turns out because of the way CMU phased in Cyrus & phased
out our legacy e-mail system (AMS) this was the desired
behavior. Users ran a program, "convertmail", that created their inbox
and uploaded their mail---and until they ran that, we didn't want
INBOXs to be created.

This probably isn't the desired behavior at almost any other site.

Larry
</quote>

We are using IMAP more and more for various solutions all around the 
world. Cyrus is a very good IMAP server. This limitation is quite a pain.

Here is the use case:
You have set up a nice LDAP interface for some manager(s) / admin(s) to 
set up user accounts. In your company all employees have email 
addresses. So naturally you want each user account to have a 
corresponding email address. With Cyrus, you'd have to either use a 
patch, or some cron job that looks for new users and logs into the IMAP 
server and creates their INBOX. This applies to SQL or other forms of 
user management as well.

I'll probably go with dovecot for now, but it would really be nice to 
have something like the dovecot plugin 
(http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/Autocreate).

It seems like we have a bunch of patches floating around. Perhaps I just 
don't understand what the problem with including them in the official 
release is.

Thanks,

Simon