Greetings.

I'm attempting to understand the courier-imap implementation of shared folders. I have played around with this feature and have read the docs (and the postfix book) on this topic (I'm using postfix and courier-imap). As I understand it:

1) Users can create shareable folders. If they want to share a message with other users, they create a shareable folder and then using their mail client, copy any shared messages into the shared folder.

2) The README.sharedfolders indicates that mail should not be delivered to directly to shared folders. The permissions are generally not correct and IMAP is expected to manage them correctly, not the maildrop program.

There have been some suggested work arounds to the question of delivery to a shared folder. For me (newbie mail admin), I found them a bit too cryptic to understand fully and it also seems unsupported within the current courier-imap design of shareable folders.

With this in mind, I am trying to understand how I can set up email accounts whose contents could to be automatically read by all email users, without simply forwarding messages to all mail users.

For example - 2 users and a virtual account:

bo...@example.com ---> uses courier-imap to get his email from maildir 'bob' fr...@example.com ---> same thing as bob except from maildir 'fred'

supp...@example.com --> another maildir 'support' - no owner (it's virtual)

Ideally, bob and fred would have a maildir within their personal maildirs that links to the support maildir. In effect, support is a 'shared' email account. New messages sent to supp...@example.com automagically appear within the 'shared' folders within bob and fred's maildirs.

However, it appears that when using courier-imap, a shared 'support' folder would not be updated unless the owner of this maildir a) created a shareable folder and b) at some interval, manually moved messages from the inbox to the shared folder using an imap client. Then fred and bob could link to this shareable folder to read those messages.

So, I'm soliciting suggestions on either:

1) Automatically moving mail from the support inbox to the support shareable folder. Can I simply run a copy command in cron? The documentation makes it sound like I need to do the movement from an inbox to a shareable folder using the imap client. Is this a job for the maildrop program? (I'm using the postfix default).

2) Solve this problem another way, but without simply forwarding all emails sent to 'supp...@example.com' to fred and bob. I don't want to waste resources duplicating messages.

Thanks for any suggestions. Jeff