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It is often desirable to depersonalise email addresses and to allow mail sent to such addresses to be processed by a number of people. As an example, consider email to a Help Desk. Firstly, the mail address used should be generic (for example help-desk@bristol.ac.uk). Additionally, mail sent to the address should not be delivered to an individual's mailbox, nor to a group of individuals' mailboxes. Instead, it should be delivered to a single mailbox which can be accessed by any of a defined group of people (Help Desk staff).
Ideally, concurrent access to the mailbox should be possible and information on any actions undertaken by any member of the group should be made available to others in the group automatically (for example, if a member of the group replies to a message then the message should be flagged as having been replied and this information made available to others in the group).
With the introduction of IMAP-4 services, all this is now possible and this is what's meant by the shared mailbox service.
It is not a service for sharing personal inboxes or other folders. With IMAP-4 these are easily shared without the need for any special service. If you want to give someone access to your inbox in order to allow them to process your email for you (either on a routine basis or while you are away on holiday, say), simply give the other person the required access. See 'How do I control access to my shared mailboxes?' for some help on using access controls.
This service is available to all staff and students.
Both of the central IMAP-4 servers offer this service (the staff server, staff-imap-srv.bris.ac.uk also known as epo and the student server student-imap-srv.bris.ac.uk also known as spo). You, and the others who will share the mailbox, will need accounts on the same server, however.
Furthermore, because the service is based on IMAP-4 you will need to use a mail program which is able to manipulate Access Control Lists, in order to be able to administer the service properly. Mulberry, our recommended mail program, fulfills these requirements.
If you receive your mail on the Staff or Student IMAP server then you should not need to do anything. If you do not, then what you need to do depends on the mail program you are using.
For Mulberry, define a new (IMAP) account and set...
For Pine, define an additional folder-collection of...
There are, but access controls are in force so you may not be able to see them. Each of postmaster@bristol.ac.uk, webmaster@bristol.ac.uk, and advisory@bristol.ac.uk (also known as help-desk@bristol.ac.uk) are serviced through shared mailboxes.
These folders are set up without 'create' access set to avoid accidental deletion. If it is necessary to create subfolders then you should first set 'create' access on the parent folder, create the subfolder(s) as required, and then remove 'create' access again. You should bring this to the attention of any user who may be sharing administration of the folders, and only users with admin access to a folder would be able to set themselves create access.
One of the features of IMAP-4 is the ability to set access controls on mail folders. These allow you to control who can do what to your folders. The "who's" are based on login identifiers (usernames) and/or group identifiers (groupnames); the "what's" include read, write and administer (the ability to grant/ revoke access rights).
Note that groupnames are specified in ACL lists using the group:<groupname> construct. For example group:comp
You can find out more about using Mulberry to control access to mail folders in the local document Further Mulberry - organising and storing your mail (document mul-g6, see the "How to share your mailbox with other Mulberry users" section) and in Mulberry's builtin help.
Note that IMAP-4 also supports "negative" access rights. These are defined by prefixing the relevant "who's" (usernames and/or groupnames) by the "-" character. For example, in the context of a folder which has universal read access set (the user anyone has been granted read access) giving the user -anonymous read access to the folder means that the anonymous user will not be able to read the folder.
Use the Shared Mailbox Request Form to ask for one to be created.
In the request form mentioned above, simply indicate that your request refers to an existing mailing list. When your request is processed, everything which needs to be done will be.
The shared mailboxes will be subject to quotas. Each shared mailbox will be initially allocated 25 megabytes. Note that this will not impinge on your personal quota.
To check your quota in Mulberry, highlight your inbox and click on the 'details' button on the top nav bar. Select 'quota'.
If you are using another client and cannot find information on your quota, you can check this using the check quota on an imap server web form.
Our mail server will notify you when you 5MB of space left (and will do so each time you open a mail folder or your inbox).
The default mail quota is 50MB for users who are staff or research postgraduates on registration, and 25MB for users who are undergraduates or teaching postgraduates on registration.
Messages continue to be delivered so long as any amount of quota is available. When a quota is exhausted, however, messages will remain queued for delivery until such a time as either space becomes available or the messages time out. If this happens, they will be returned to the associated mailing list owner.
No, not yet.
The local convention is that generic email addresses will be named in the same way as mailing lists (names must start with an alphabetic, and must include at least one "-"; other characters permitted are the digits 0-9 and alphabetics a-z. All addresses are case insensitive and so will always be registered in lower case.).
This naming requirement may be waived, however, where accepted standards exist for naming email addresses (RFC 2142, which lists webmaster, postmaster and abuse for example, is such a standard).
At the time of writing, there is a proposed Internet standard (RFC 2192) which "defines a URL scheme for referencing objects on an IMAP server". This would allow IMAP mail folders to be referenced using URLs. If your browser has support for this standard, then you should be able to access your shared mailboxes "from the web".