Topic: Shared Email Folders

[balther]

Hi,

I used to use SME Server back when e-smith server5 was cutting edge which was a couple of jobs ago.

I am looking at the possibility of using it again to replace exchange server and was wondering the following.

Is it easy to set-up shared imap folders?

I have a few accounts (info@ sales@ etc.) which are used buy the sale/customerservices team. I currently use public folders under exchange but I would like to move back to a linux based solution.

I also need to easily be able to replicate the out of office feature of exchange server.

Balther

[soprom]

The only thing that used to do this sharing of mail folders was the cyrus/imap package for SME6. But nobody could update it for version 6.5 or 7.

This lack of such a sharing mechanism will make some of us turn to other solutions like Kolab since this need does not seem to catch the attention of the dev-team. It's sad.

This subject has been discussed in the pass with no conclusion.
I hope someone can proove me wrong!!

See also this thread:
http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=25261.msg101796#msg101796

[Brenno]

Could you not use IMAP with a password that all sales people know?  IMAP would keep the messages on the server so that all parties could see all messages (until deleted.)  You could even set up multiple profiles under the Info and Sales accounts to allow individualized responses from the various sales people.

You can also get the user-manager contrib which would allow the users or admin to set vacation messages.

[soprom]

As we want to use connectors like Toltec & InsightConnector (some opensource projects are also on the way) to use Outlook calendar & contacts sharing, we need an IMAP server supporting public folders. Even if there are workarounds, they never quite achieve the goal.

The roadmap for the Kolab project says it will support multi-domain in a short while. When this is ready, I'll use this as a mail server unless something shows up on SME's side...

[Tib]

soprom

Have you played around with Open Xchange yet ... it will do what you want ... I am playing around with it right now and you can have public folders/contacts/tasks/calendar and quite a few more nice features.

Worth checking out on a test server.

Also it has been set-up to integrate in with the rest of SME including user set-up.

A bit more testing an I will be setting it up in my work place very soon.

Ohh and the OXconector works well ... a small per user fee but hey ... at least you don't pay for exchange.

Regards,

Tib

[soprom]

Yes I've tried OX and I agree it's a great software. But even here, in order to fully make use of it, mail folder sharing is a plus if not a must!

[Tib]

soprom

Maybe I'm missing the point somewhere but OX does mail folder sharing with whoever you give permission to ... everyone or a select few. You just have to setup the mail folders.

And with the OXtender you can intergrate it with Outlook or run things straight off OX.

Regards,

Tib

[azche24]

Hi folks,

it seems i do not understand your problem:

We created an "office" account on SME 6.01, to which all "info" and similar crap is routed. And then we use IMAP boxes for office from every Thundermail-User in the office, to get access to it. Quite an open password, but shared email is insecure anyway.

This should work with 6.5 or 7 also, or am i misunderstanding something here?

[soprom]

The technique you refer to is a workaround, and it's a minimum I would say. It's a shared account instead of a shared folder. Multiple simultaneously write accesses on a single mailbox can be a problem too. I've seen problems a shared account Shared folders on an IMAP server must be seen in action to fully see it's potential.

It is more than an info box with all client connected to it. Folders can be created as needed and reorganized by users with permissions.

You can also have user's folders shared by others simply by subsribing to any given folder (with permissions). The sysop does not have to get involved in the day-to-day management of folders.

It also means an Access Control List to manage permissions on folders. It is like what we know about files sharing, but applied to mailboxes.It can also be used with Seive Mail filtering.

I believe that the dev-team is using dovecot for it's performance (which appears to be better than cyrus) and when dovecot will come up with sharing, we'll get it for SME. In the mean time, a fully functionnal server if available from  kolab.org It's not simple to get it but it works just fine. I simply delegate mail serving from SME to kolab.[/b]

[soprom]

Seen on the dovecot site but I don't know if it applies to SME:

Code: [Select]

Maildir

It's important to have dovecot-shared file created in the shared maildir with the permissions and group ID you want to have access to the mailbox. Dovecot uses the same permissions and GID when it creates index files, dovecot-uidlist file, new mail files, etc.

There are two ways to do the actual sharing. Symlinking or defining a namespace. Symlinking is done simply by creating a symlink to destination maildir in user's maildir.

Namespaces can be used to define more globally shared folders. For example:

namespace public {
  separator = /
  prefix = Public/
  location = /var/mail/public
}


And this about cyrus:

Cyrus stores mail in Maildir style repositories instead of in mbox files in the mail spool directory. (Note: Maildir is a completely separate format; Cyrus works as a "black-box" server -- other software must not access Cyrus' mail folders directly on disk; they should only be accessed through Cyrus itself, ie IMAP or POP3.)

While [dovecot] supports IMAP without a lot of extra configuration, some of the reasons you might want to consider Cyrus include.

    * Support for mail quotas. (Dovecot supports mail quotas also, but Maildir++ quota isn't yet supported. Hard filesystem quota can also be problematic.)

    * Supports Folders inside Folders, Shared Mailboxes, Bulletin Board Folders. (Dovecot does not support shared mailboxes, but does support folders inside of folders, as most IMAP servers.)

    * Support for SASL authentication. (Dovecot uses SASL as well, but not Cyrus' SASL library; Dovecot has its own.)

    * Server-side filtering support with SIEVE. (The developers of DBMail have split Cyrus' SIEVE code into a separate library called LibSIEVE; DBMail currently supports LibSIEVE. Filtering can also happen at the MTA level -- i.e., Postfix or Qmail.)