A filesystem permission-based shared maildir (containing subfolders to share) is created as :

/mail/mis-reports : drwxr-x--- 16 mis-reports mis 4096 Dec 13 16:22 . drwxr-xr-x 84 root root 4096 Dec 13 16:13 .. drwxr-x--- 6 mis-reports mis 4096 Dec 13 15:26 .alerts -rw------- 1 mis-reports mis 162 Dec 13 15:12 .mailfilter drwxr-x--- 6 mis-reports mis 4096 Dec 13 15:44 .postmaster drwxr-x--- 2 mis-reports mis 4096 Dec 13 15:26 courierimaphieracl drwxr-x--- 2 mis-reports mis 4096 Dec 13 15:26 courierimapkeywords -rw-r----- 1 mis-reports mis 125 Dec 13 15:46 courierimapsubscribed drwxr-x--- 2 mis-reports mis 4096 Dec 13 15:26 cur -rw------- 1 mis-reports mis 455 Dec 13 18:03 duplicate.cache drwxr-x--- 2 mis-reports mis 20480 Dec 13 16:37 new drwxr-x--- 2 mis-reports mis 4096 Dec 13 16:35 tmp

And folks can subscribe to the various sub-folders (alerts, postmaster, etc) after creating a shared-maildirs file : mis-reports /mail/mis-reports

...and see all existing articles. Nobody logs into "mis-reports" itself - just an archive mailbox.

New mail for "mis-reports+alerts" winds up in .alerts/new . User logs in and opens a shared folder, wherein their imapd tries to move articles in /new into /cur, but obviously can't because they don't own the directory :

Dec 13 17:24:48 leon imapd: rename(/mail/mis-reports/.test/new/1102984501.M972872P3086V0000000000000011I00B2F32C_0.leon,S=847,/transmeta/cmail/mis-reports/.test/cur/1102984501.M972872P3086V0000000000000011I00B2F32C_0.leon,S=847:2,) failed: Permission denied

but nevertheless, it opens the folder to find only articles in the cur/ directory and nothing recent.

How are other users expected to manage a shared mailbox, short of giving write access to everyone ?

What's the proper way to handle this ? Ideally, would like to have maildrop deliver directly to the cur/ directory and skip new/ altogether and not worry about it.

(maildrop 1.7.0; imap 3.0.7; RHEL3)

thanks, -ericb