[Kde-kiosk] kmail

[Segedunum]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 21:47:39, Alain SECOND wrote:
> I use KDE some for 5 years..
> I have "sold" Linux $ KDE to an association.

Well, it's fantastic that you've been able to do that and are considering KDE 
and Kiosk.

> My problem: how to allow only root user to delete received mails?
> (tried to set permissions of .Mail/inbox, but kmail crashes...
> Please if you reply: I am not a developer! be simple!

Mmm. Interesting. I think that this should be able to be set via file 
permissions somehow, but the problem is - how to do it? This has to be a file 
access solution to be useful (whatever that might be), as the mails will be 
saved in the users' directories. I don't think Kiosk can really help there as 
users would, in reality, still have access to these files. Alexander is 
right. There needs to be some sort of file permission restriction here - 
whatever form that might take, but it may not be straightforward. The correct 
solution is not an action restriction because it doesn't solve the real 
problem - access to the mails.

As KMail moves things around it isn't going to like not having proper access 
to mails. There is also the problem of KMail running under a particular user 
(of course), a user then retrieving their mail to the client (POP3 etc.) and 
then having their mails saved under that user. To do that a user has to be 
able to write to the directory to get their mail - there's no real way around 
that.

What permissions are you trying to set on the Inbox directory? You might 
consider filesystem Access Control Lists on the directory, but this is not 
good to manage over many clients. You might consider storing your user 
directories centrally, or even just the inbox directory centrally, and this 
will allow your server mail system to distribute the files to directories 
with the permissions of your choice. Procmail should be able to do that. You 
can then lock KMail to only look for mails in that location, probably through 
Kiosk. I'm not a Kiosk buff yet at all, but I'm sure that is possible. With 
this set up KMail would merely read the contents of the Inbox directory, but 
not have to download and write mails to it.

There is the problem of how KMail will react to this kind of file access set 
up though. How would KMail react to a user trying to delete a mail they 
didn't have write access to? Could you double up and stop deletion through 
Kiosk?

An IMAP set up might also be something to consider. Whatever you do, you need 
something that is managed centrally.

That all depends on the kind of set up you have though, so I could be way, 
way, way off base here. I've just went through some options. Let us know a 
bit more info.

Cheers,

David.

PS. I have only been on this list for 48 hours because I wanted to learn about 
Kiosk and what it would be capable of doing, and already I've seen some 
totally unecessary comments. Alexander was right in a way and wrong in 
others, but this is not a straightforward set up (I had to seriously think 
about the above) so he probably hadn't thought it through fully. That's no 
reason to go down his throat.

It seems like a small, dedicated list set up to help the development of a very 
good and promising system. Let's try and help each other use it please.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0xCECCF06D.asc
Type: application/pgp-keys
Size: 1702 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-kiosk/attachments/20040627/a790d85e/0xCECCF06D.bin