On Fri, 27 Oct 2006, Erik Kangas wrote:
I wondered if it is possible to have a file or files in a users mail tree
that will either not show up when you do an IMAP LIST, or which will be
"non-selectable".
It is not feasible to do this based upon the contents of a file. It was
tried, 15+ years ago, and it proved to be a performance nightmare. Today,
imapd will happily select any readable file.
The only other way is to do this based upon the file name.
(1) One obvious method, as you noted, is to use directories to separate
non-mailbox files from mailboxes. So you would move any tgz outside of
the mail tree. This is what most people do, and which is the best
supported.
(2) Another method, as Michael Cashwell noted, is to set the hideDotFiles
varaible in env_unix.c to T instead of the default of NIL; then files
which start with "." won't appear in LIST but will still be selectable.
Michael noted some potential pitfalls in suppressing dot files. One
pitfall that he did not mention is that some clients (notably Pine) have a
"suppress dot files in listings" option; and are quite aggrieved if the
IMAP server does this unilaterally instead of passing the data to the
client and letting the client decide.
(3) Yet another method is to decide that to use filename suffixes (what
used to be called "extensions") to declare a file type...and get flamed
for violating UNIX orthodoxy. You'd have to write code to implement this;
the old 16-bit DOS code had something to this effect. I had unhappy
experiences with the DOS code that I'm not eager to repeat, and the 32-bit
Windows code does not do that.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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