Mailbox sharing with symlinks

It’s possible to share mailboxes simply by symlinking them among user’s private mailboxes. See Filesystem permissions (in shared mailboxes) for issues related to filesystem permissions.

Maildir

ln -s /home/user2/Maildir/.Work /home/user1/Maildir/.shared.user2
ln -s /home/user3/Maildir/.Work /home/user1/Maildir/.shared.user3

Now user1 has a “shared” directory containing “user2” and “user3” child mailboxes, which point to those users’ “Work” mailbox.

With Maildir++ layout it’s not possible to automatically share “mailbox and its children”. You’ll need to symlink each mailbox separately. With the “fs” layout this is possible though.

mbox

Doing the same as in the above Maildir example:

mkdir /home/user1/mail/shared
ln -s /home/user2/mail/Work /home/user1/mail/shared/user2
ln -s /home/user3/mail/Work /home/user1/mail/shared/user3

One additional problem with mbox format is the creation of dotlock files. The dotlocks would be created under user1’s directory, which makes them useless. Make sure the locking works properly with only fcntl or flock locking (See Mbox Locking) and just disable dotlocks. Alternatively instead of symlinking an mbox file, put the shared mailboxes inside a directory and symlink the entire directory.