Creating folders via IMAP, folder names with spaces, mail to folders...

[Waschk, Kolja]

Hi,

we consider to migrate from an MS Exchange setup to Kolab v2. We make heavy use of public folders and have several folders which can be reached directly by e-mail, e.g. one for every particular project, for mailing lists etc.. overall they contain about 6 GB of mail and articles.

I have been able to transfer most of the data to a Kolab server using imapsync (with a patched IMAPClient module, because our Exchange server often reported a RFC822.SIZE not matching the actual size of mails). But during further evaluation, the following issues came up (with 2.0.4 release):

1) Folders created via IMAP don't show up in web admin interface (they're probably not added automatically to the LDAP database, maybe a cron job should do this which I didn't trigger yet?)

2) Nothing prevents creation of folders with spaces in their name, but mail to them doesn't work, because it isn't possible to specify local parts of recipients with spaces in them. I looked if it's possible to specify alternative addresses for those folders and came across http://www.intevation.de/roundup/kolab/issue1036 - what's it current state? I can see that "alias" MAY be specified for kolabSharedFolders in LDAP in upcoming Kolab server release but is it honored? Can I mail to a folder using this alias?

If we transferred the folder hierarchy as-is, a large number of folders would be named like 

 "shared.folders/Projects/XX123456X - 2. Extension Of Test Project"

Sure, we can rename them all to look more like newsgroup names. Actually this is a minor issue and won't keep us from migrating from Exchange. But maybe there is a simple solution to enable mailing to those folders with spaces in their names? If they could be given simple aliases, this would solve it... (the example above could be reached as xx123456x at mydomain.tld)

On the other hand, I feel that something should prevent creation of folders that lack certain functionality because of special characters in their name.

Kolja

-- 
Mr. K. Waschk - telos EDV Systementwicklung GmbH, Hamburg, DE