Michail Pappas
Bit confused at first, but I believe I understand what you mean. SME is employed only for email, no windows log-in functionality here...
Then my suggestion should be workable, it just means the current username based email addresses become group name based email addresses, so as to keep continuity of the publicly known email address for each user. The users themselves connect now to the server with a different newusername details, so their username has changed eg from rob to rob1 or whatever, and rob becomes a group name of which all three users are members eg rob1, jake1 & fred1. Same for the others jake & fred become group names that forward to rob1, jake1 & fred1, (then of course also create new users jake1 & fred1 or whatever).
Make sure you move all existing email messages BEFORE deleting user names (and change ownership of all the email files etc).
Sorry, I do not understand this bit; groups are merely aliases for a bunch of users, just redirects. Isn't that correct? It feels as though you are hinting that groups are acting as normal mailboxes too, with storage allocated for them, for example.
No not hinting that at all. Just saying you can use a group name as an email address which forwards to a user account, the user account being where the messages are stored etc. But you will then have two valid email addresses per "newuser", the username and the groupname. If external or other users send messages to any of the three persons, then messages sent to an existing username will only be delivered to that user, but messages sent to the group email name will be sent to all three users.
So you will ideally need to force others users to only use the group email addresses for sending messages to.
I also mean that you change the Reply To: address in each users email client to show the group@mydoman address rather than the user@mydomain address, so that people only send to the address that you know will forward to all users (via the group address). The vacation message idea was a way to force this knowledge down other other users throats to make them send to the group address rather than the user address.
Hope that is clearer !
It is really quite simple, that's part of the whole idea of having groups, pseudonyms, and pseudonyms of pseudonyms etc, to give sme this sort of user versatility.
Theoretically in many changing staff situations, everyone should be given a group (or pseudonym) name, and then whatever redirections you want can be easily accomodated. They of course connect with a different user name, but their publicly advertised address is the group@mydomain or pseudonym@mydomain address. You have to ideally implement this sort of policy from day one for easier management.
In your case it is easy to change over to this method, it just means in order to integrate this change now, that the users have to change their ways slightly.
Which way you prefer to do it, and the pros & cons & logistics of each method is for you to decide.