How do I set up shared IMAP folders?

Question

Level 1

27 points

How do I set up shared IMAP folders?

Does anyone know how to add a shared IMAP folder on a client machine so that it appears in their Mail account? I'm doing some support for a small company that has its own 10.5 Mail server in-house. Three of the users in the office are able to access a shared IMAP folder (it's just the sent mail from another user's account). Now the owner wants me to set up the other two clients in the same way but i don't know how the original three were set up. The icon on the correctly configured client machines shows a gray folder instead of the usual blue. I thought it might be a subscription, but the folder I want to subscribe to doesn't show up as an option when I go to the Subscription List (by right-clicking on any IMAP folder on any given client account). Do I have to delegate who has authorization by adding permissions to the account that is doing the sharing? I poked around in the WGM and the Mail service but didn't see anything relevant...

Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Mar 11, 2010 5:45 PM

Reply

Answer 1

foilpan

Level 4

1,385 points

Mar 11, 2010 6:09 PM in response to Brewster B

take a look at this, since 10.5 uses cyrus for imap:

https://sites.google.com/a/explanatorygap.net/siradmin/

Reply

Answer 2

Brewster B Author

Level 1

27 points

Mar 11, 2010 7:03 PM in response to foilpan

Looks good, although I'm wary of introducing a new element to the mix. Client is heavily reliant on everyone viewing the 45GB folder at the moment. If this caused any hiccups, I'd understandably get an earful.

Reply

Answer 3

foilpan

Level 4

1,385 points

Mar 11, 2010 7:15 PM in response to Brewster B

well, you can use cyradmin to take a look at the other shared folders on the server side without changing anything. i'm going to guess that's the way the shared folder was setup in the first place.

of course, this begs the question: why does this client/company share 45 gb of sent mail in this fashion, and how could they better use technology and/or resources for their needs?

it sounds like yet another gross misuse of mail standards. just because you can share that huge pile of mail data doesn't mean you should.

Reply

Answer 4

pterobyte

Level 6

11,104 points

Mar 12, 2010 12:10 PM in response to Brewster B

You can only share it via IMAP ACLs and the simplest way to set these up is using SirAdmin as pointed out by foilpan.

That said, you should quickly consider alternatives. That 45GB mailbox is going to bite you sooner or later. Cyrus is not good at handling such large mailboxes (and I fully agree with foilpan that this is not good practice)

Reply