[Kolab-devel] Changing the primary email address via webadmin - and its implications

[Daniel Hoffend]

Hello Thomas

>Before filing tickets against various components of Kolab I'd first 
>like learn about the intended behavior in case the user name (and with 
>it the primary email address) is changed. Should this really rename the 
>mailbox in IMAP? Apparently it should. In pykolab, there's 
>imap.user_mailbox_rename() which is called by kolabd. Fair enough, 
>although it reports an error. But is this operation also supposed to 
>rename all other mailboxes recursively? I didn't dig into the cyruslib 
>codebase which executes this change.
Yes. Afaik you must rename the users mailbox because postfix is looking 
up the mail attribute (primary_mail) and then delivers the message to 
the primary mail address using lmtp. Cyrus will then delivers the mail 
to user/<mailaddress>

The renaming process doesn't only care about the actual naming but also 
on switch the ACLs from the old primary_mail acl to the new primary_mail 
attribute. Without changing the access rights, the mailbox would have 
the right name, but the wrong ACL denying you access to your old data.

If you decided to not rename the old mailbox folders you must at least 
update the ACLs that are bound to the mailboxes.

IMHO it would create more confusing for the enduser to find their old 
stuff, calender, etc in the "Other Users" section rather then having a 
new internal name (which usually all endusers will usually never see 
anyway).

I've some ideas about where the problem could be located. But I would 
need to redo my tests.

>And shouldn't old email addresses be kept as secondary mails? In LDAP, 
>all the old addresses are gone:
Well ... I would leave this to the administrator or at least keep it 
optional (as a parameter).

Automatically adding an old primary address as secondary would only make 
sense in scenarios where the receipient_policy has been enforced (which 
is not always the case). Just imagine the fact that someone would change 
the primary adress (due to a typo or what else) and you automatically 
add it back as secondary. You then would have to edit it again unless it 
was done while editing the user record in kolab-webadmin.

But for them moment I would vote with a "no auto-adding".

Hope that helps

--
Regards
Daniel
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