Maildir and local folder sharing

[Tiago Marques Delboni]

Hi!

We're looking for a reliable way to share multi GB local folders among a small groups of Windows clients. Most of the time there will be no need to give everybody write access – a single writer would do it.

Unfortunately, due to many TB hangings, it didn't work with NFS - either sharing a folder on one of the clients or mounting a NAS drive.

Now, we’re thinking about give maildir a try but found this not very encouraging article:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/maildir-thunderbird

Apart from raising the quota on IMAP accounts – we can’t do that right now – what would you (not) recommend?

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Tiago Marques Delboni
Gerência de Aplicações e Suporte a Clientes / GTI
(31) 2108-7700

[Sean M. Pappalardo]

Hello.

As far as I know, mbox local folders are not intended to be used by more
than one TB instance, which would explain the hangs you saw trying to do
so. (You could test though by creating them on a test machine, closing
TB, denying write permissions on the whole local folder tree at the file
system level, then start TB and see if it hangs when trying to access
them. I suspect it will. You can also try setting up a test maildir tree
this way (still write-denied) and see if TB handles that any better,
before adding in the extra complexity of a network folder.) TB creates
indexes of each folder and needs to be able to write to do this, so my
guess is that on a write-protected tree, at best, TB would appear to
hang as it re-generates the index each time any folder is accessed.

Since IMAP is designed for concurrent access, can you not create a
single additional IMAP account used only for the shared folders and add
that to each user's TB instance? This way you only have to increase or
disable the quota on this one account.

Sincerely,
Sean M. Pappalardo
Sr. Networks Engineer
Renegade Technologies
spapp...@renegadetech.com
Office: (630) 631-6188
http://www.renegadetech.com

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[Tiago Marques Delboni]

Hi Sean

Local folders with mbox does need write permission, otherwise Thunderbird won't open de messages. The hangs I experienced happened when sharing a local folder between two clients. Works for a little while then, probably due to concurrent access to index or metadata, it hangs.

We do have shared IMAP accounts but, with the pandemic going on, there was a surge in demand for space that we can cope with right now. To accommodate this and clear space, users were forced to move messages to local folders and now we're trying to share them.

Tiago Marques Delboni

[Wayne]

Sharing files that Thunderbird uses simply isn't supported - it's not in the code, nor will you get user support. 

Generalizing further, all profile data is intended for single user only - no simultaneous use.

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