Hi List- I feel like I should know the answer to this/these questions after having read as much documentation as I now have, but I don't. I've also carefully searched the mailing list archives for answers to these questions but don't see them there either. I have checked the documentation included with my cyrus package, but it's not specific enough to help me past this point.
I'm using cyrus imap 2.2.12 on a gentoo system for virtual domains and everything works fine. I'd like to implement some shared folders and bulletin boards (using the meanings of those concepts from O'Reilly's Managing IMAP book which I realize is out of date but seems to be the most complete documentation available for IMAP in general if not the most accurate because of its age). As I said, everything works fine for individual private mail boxes for me in multiple hosted domains. Specific questions: 1) Is it possible to make a bulletin board folder (with a per-user seen state) that is accessible to only those users with accounts in the same virtual domain as the bulletin board? 2) Is it possible to make a bulletin board folder (with a per-user seen state) that is accessible to only a subset of those users? 3) If yes, exactly how does one go about doing so? I've read about the postuser setting in imapd.conf. I'm thinking that I'll leave this at the default empty string value. I've read about how to post messages to such a bulletin board in list archives, but not how to create the bulletin board in the first place. O'Reilly's book explains the difference between "Shared Folders" and "Bulletin Boards" as follows: from page 167: "Shared folders and bulletin boards are ordinary Cyrus mailboxes with ACLs that allow more than one user access to the mailbox. There is really not much difference between shared folders and bulletin boards: they are both Cyrus mailboxes, and both allow users other than the mailbox owner to access the mailbox with the permissions defined in the mailbox's ACL." But... Shared Folders: "...owned by an individual user who wants to allow other users access to the mailbox. An additional feature of a shared folder is that, other than the "read" flag, it does not retain message state information that is unique per user. Message information like deleted and important is global to all users. That feature could be useful if it is desirable to preserve state information across accesses by different users. If you use a shared folder for a group of users, such as a Helpdesk, chances are you will want to preserve the seen and answered states across sessions, to provide a sort of work flow for the Helpdesk employees." Bulletin Boards: "A Cyrus mailbox that is owned by the system, rather than by an individual user. Bulletin boards are generally used when it is desirable to maintain a per-user seen state. Good uses for bulletin boards are forums such as Usenet groups and Internet mailing lists." I'd like to experiment with both of these concepts and I think I know how to do so with shared folders (create a "user.joesharedfolder" type top-level mailbox, then create any desired sub-folders under it like "user.joesharedfolder.public" and then adjust folder ACLs accordingly) but I have no clue for how to do so with bulletin boards. O'Reilly's book spends about a page and a half describing how to implement shared folders and it seems clear enough. However, it devotes only a third of a page to implementing bulletin boards and there is nothing specific in that section at all about creating the mailbox. I've seen hints in the list archives about creating a mailbox called "bb.bulletinboard". Is this "user.X" and "bb.X" syntax important to Cyrus imapd? I've always created mailboxes with "user." as the prefix to any user's inbox and whatever follows the dot is the username and email address (without the @domain.com of course). Never tried anything else because I've never seen that described in any other way. Can someone give me some specific detailed information on creating a bulletin board (rather than a shared folder as defined herein)? Maybe even including cyradm commands? Along the same lines, could folks share examples of how they are using these two different concepts in their organizations? I want to make a public folder (or several; either shared folders or bulletin boards) for a number of different uses, and I may want per-user state information or I may not want per-user state information depending on which use I have in mind, but the implications of that distinction seem at least a little bit subtle to me. When O'Reilly says that "shared folders" have message states (like deleted or important) that are global to all users, I wonder what else is global. Is it only the "seen" message state that is different for each user with shared folders or some other states as well? I realize that specific answer is addressed by the book (and included above) but that's also five years old now. I can't help but wonder if these concepts have changed a little bit in that time in the imapd implementation. And if it is only the "seen" state that is per-user unique, how are people using that? In a Helpdesk group as the book writes about? Other uses too? I have the same questions about bulletin boards. Exactly which message states are global and which are unique per user? Is every message state unique per user with bulletin boards? That seems to be what O'Reilly is saying but again, that's very old information. And how are people using bulletin boards? Also, do I need to make sure my imapd.conf has some specific parameters present in it for this to work or is simply creating the mailboxes and adjusting ACLs enough? And then, just to make sure I understand, what are all of the ways that one can get a message into such a folder? Is copying and/or moving a message from one mailbox (in a MUA) to this public folder going to work? (I would expect that it would using the IMAP command set)? Can one also do so using a MTA such as sendmail or postfix? If so, what address should be in the "To: " field for this to work? Say the mailbox created was: "bb.MyBulletinBoard" What address would I use to post to that using an MTA like postfix? Sorry for the length. Many thanks in advance for any replies. -Kevin ---- Cyrus Home Page: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus Cyrus Wiki/FAQ: http://cyruswiki.andrew.cmu.edu List Archives/Info: http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/mailing-list.html
