Why are user inboxes called "user.some-user" ?

[Conrad Kleinespel]

Hello Nic,

Thanks for your time :-)

This clears things up a bit for me.

However, my question was meant to ask why we even need to separate
things into "user/..." and "netnews/..." and "shared/..." instead of
just handling everything through the ACL extension (which should allow
to have shared mailboxes by given read only access, right?).

I understand that we have those abstractions in place but I don't yet
understand why we need those abstractions.

For instance, why couldn't we put everything in the same namespace:
    root
        comp.mail.imap
        fred

and when a user "fred" wants access to the mailbox, just request "fred"
instead of "user.fred" ?

Best regards,

Conrad Kleinespel
conradk at conradk.com
+33 6 23 82 42 79

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015, at 10:46 PM, Nic Bernstein wrote:
> Conrad,
> It's important to keep clear the difference between what the server 
> knows about, such as "user", "news", "some-shared-folder" and what the 
> client presents to you, such as "Other Users", "Shared Folders", etc.  
> The former map to actual hierarchy elements, whereas the latter are 
> purely abstractions.
> 
> Similarly, there is abstraction between a user's mailboxes and what they 
> see in their client.  The user "fred" will, by default, have the mailbox 
> named user.fred (or user/fred if unixhierarchysep is enabled) but it 
> will appear to them as INBOX in their client. Depending upon the setting 
> of altnamespace, a user's mailbox named "user.fred.Stuff" may appear as 
> "INBOX.Stuff" or as "Stuff".
> 
> If you're exporting NNTP via IMAP, then the 'newsprefix' option is used 
> to determine the root of the net news hierarchy.  For example, if 
> imapd.conf has "newsprefix: netnews" then the comp.mail.imap newsgroup 
> would be found in the netnews.comp.mail.imap folder, which might appear 
> in, for example, Thunderbird as "Shared Filders/netnews/comp/mail/imap"
> 
> Check out the docs here:
>      http://www.cyrusimap.org/docs/cyrus-imapd/2.4.17/overview.php
> 
> Cheers,
>      -nic
> 
> PS - I've listed the 2.4.17 link on the old site as some of the stuff on 
> the new site, docs.cyrus.foundation, aren't working yet.
> 
> On 07/16/2015 03:02 PM, Conrad Kleinespel wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I hope you are all having a nice week :-)
> >
> > I am wondering why user inboxes have to be created as "user.some-user"
> > instead of just "some-user" within the Cyrus IMAP server. I have a few
> > ideas, but am unsure:
> > - is it because all "user.*" inboxes have, by default, the same
> > permissions as "user" ?
> > - is it just so that emails are stuffed inside the
> > "/var/spool/imap/user/some-user" folder on disk ?
> > - something else ?
> >
> > Also, what are some cases where using something other than "user.*"
> > might be useful ? I noticed shared mailboxes are sometimes created as
> > "shared.some-shared-user", which creates a
> > "/var/spool/imap/shared/some-shared-user" directory for incoming email.
> > But that's all I have noticed about it.
> >
> > Thanks a lot for your help.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Conrad Kleinespel
> > conradk at conradk.com
> > +33 6 23 82 42 79
> > ----
> > Cyrus Home Page: http://www.cyrusimap.org/
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> > To Unsubscribe:
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> 
> -- 
> Nic Bernstein                             nic at onlight.com
> Onlight, Inc.                             www.onlight.com
> 1442 N Farwell Ave., Suite 600            v. 414.272.4477
> Milwaukee, Wisconsin  53202
> 
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