> 2.  Turn the imap service into a black box.  This would involve
>      provisioning each user with a separate home directory locally
>      on the imap server for their personal imap store and the various
>      .dot files sendmail would like to see, plus anything procmail
>      might like to see.  Then we'd then have to come up with a way
>      for users to manage their .dot files inside the black box which
>      is getting complicated and not very transparent for users.

This is the right solution for the "personal imap store", IMHO, but the
dotfiles are a separate issue. You need to decide how you want to handle
inbound mail and perhaps consider that it doesn't need to be done on the
IMAP server, in which case all those files can be mounted on another
machine so long as you're able to transfer the mail after it's been
processed on that machine to the correct mail folder on the IMAP machine.

My personal preference is to have sendmail (postfix, actually) and procmail
running on the IMAP server for simplicity but maybe to NFS mount those
files used by sendmail and procmail, and to keep them in the user's
"normal" home directory. There are multiple ways to make them available
on the IMAP server; it depends on whether you accept the uw-imap default
of "home directory" being what it says in the password file, amongst other
things. You can symlink to the NFS mounted versions, or periodically copy
the contents of the files, etc.

But there's no reason to think the dotfiles and the IMAP folders require
the same solution. That's the main point.

You might also like to read

http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/imap-uw/2006-November/000934.html

and the surrounding thread.

Cheers,

        - Joel
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