Exim permissions when sharing a dovecot mailfolder

Question

Using dovecot on debian wheezy, I have just set up a shared mailfolder inside another user's mail folder to be able to share the contents of this mailfolder with some other users, wthout duplicating incoming mails:

/var/mail/secretary/.shared.fax/

I then made a symlink inside my mailbox to this shared mailbox:

# ln -s /var/mail/secretary/.shared.fax-in /var/mail/vincent/.shared.fax

I set the permissions wide open to test this setup:

drwxrwsrwx  5 root  mail  4096 nov 28 15:38 .shared-fax

I was able to populate this folder from the Evolution mailclient using the shared folder, (which lead me to believe it was working), but then a new fax came in and was routed to this folder using an Exim 'forward-file':

if $header_from: contains "FaxMaster"
then
     save /var/mail/secretary/.shared-fax/
     finish
endif

Apparently, this messed up the permissions, because since then the mailclient allows me to see the amount of new emails in that folder, but not the new emails itself.

I presume this is caused by permissions, but I cannot find the right settings (I tried chowning folders and/or files to root/user, but to no avail - maybe I need some specific mix'n match permissions?) Thx!

Answer 1

The permissions are set by the directory_mode and mode settings in the maildir_home transport. The group as well.

You may want to look at using a shared namespace in Dovecot to allow sharing the folder.