Re: setup for imap server with many users

[William Gardella]

Gour <gour@atmarama.net> writes:

> On Wed, 16 Jan 2013 17:52:15 +0000
> William Gardella <gardellawg@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> AFAIK, the Emacs `auth-source' library used by Gnus does not
>> understand multiple users on the same domain, so it will be very
>> tricky to use a local IMAP configuration like the one you're
>> describing.  Auth-source expects a 1:1 correspondence between users
>> and domains.
>
> Hmm...I'd bet that I had such setup working normally in the past except
> that instead of having:
>
> user1@domain1.com
> user2@domain2.com
> ...
>
> I was having just: 
>
> user1
> user2
> ...

Wow.  Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I've never seen any such setup for
auth-source and have no clue how you would support it.

>> If, as I infer from your description of your local Dovecot setup, all
>> of these IMAP users are you, you'd probably be better off having all
>> of your remote IMAP accounts go to a single inbox on the Dovecot
>> server. 
>
> There are actually three users with 6 accounts - 4 are mine + my wife &
> mother.

All going to your Emacs and Gnus?  It might make more sense to give each
of them their own Emacs initfile and system user.

>> You can use (info "(gnus) Posting Styles") to make sure that
>> replies are handled correctly for each remote IMAP user and
>> mail-splitting or server-side IMAP folders to make the deluge of mail
>> easier to manage. 
>
> I was using posting styles in the past and have them setup now, but the
> problem is selecting right IMAP folders.
>
> Too bad, I haven't preserve the whole old setup, but will try to google
> to find posts on which it was based...there were many posts about using
> Gnus+local dovecot instead of using (buggy) maildir back-end.

FTR, the maildir backend isn't particularly buggy these days.  Also, the
local Dovecot hack for Gnus pertains mostly to an era when nnimap was
too slow for acceptable use, which is no longer really the case.
Particularly with the Agent and (setq gnus-asynchronous t), its
performance is just fine.  If I were you, I'd cut out the Dovecot step
entirely and just use Gnus+nnimap directly to the remote hosts.  It is
much less of a "Rube Goldberg machine" than the setup you currently
have.

Sincerely,
Gour

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