Sharing Kerio Folders, Calendars and Contacts

Kerio "folders" consist of mail folders, calendars, contacts and notes. Every user has their own private folders (but can share any of them with other users) and there are also Public Folders which are automatically available to all users.

Contacts, Calendar events and so on can be added to public folders by the Administrator. That's the Admin account created at installation, not administrator accounts added later. The primary administrator can give access rights to other users if desired.

Users see Public folders automatically, but need to specifically "subscribe" to other folders that may be available to them. For example, suppose I create a new Contact list in my main folder. I right-click on that and choose "Access Rights". I can then choose whether I want to share that with specific users/groups or all users (or users from a specific domain). That folder won't show up in Public Folders no matter how it is shared.. A user who wants to subscribe to that has to know that I am sharing it. They would right-click on their top level folder or choose "Subscribe Shared Folders" in the WebMail Settings to initiate the shared folder subscription dialog. The contact list will then show up and can be searched when composing mail. Names will be completed automatically in Webmail if that option is set in Settings. The user should also select which contact folders to search automatically.

At the file system level, all of these are simply text files. For example, on a Mac OS X system, you'll find the Public folders at /usr/local/kerio/mailserver/store/mail/localhost/#public. Let's say that we wanted to add a contact directly at the file system level (by an external program, for example).

Contacts are simply .eml files stored in the Contacts/#msgs directory:

# ls -l ?msgs
total 32
-rw-------  1 root  apl  265 Apr  7  2008 00000001.eml
-rw-------  1 root  apl  310 Nov 15 11:16 00000002.eml
-rw-------  1 root  apl  310 Nov 15 13:24 00000003.eml
-rw-------  1 root  apl  300 Nov 15 13:30 00000004.eml

A sparsely filled out contact might look like this:

Subject: ralph
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:16:12 -0500
Content-Type: text/vcard; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
PRODID:-//kerio.com/Contacts//NONSGML v1.0//EN
N:;ralph;;;
FN:ralph
X-FILE-AS:ralph
CLASS:PUBLIC
EMAIL;TYPE=PREF,HOME:ralphie@gop.com
END:VCARD

You can create 00000005.eml with the new contact. All that remains is to rename "index.fld" in /usr/local/kerio/mailserver/store/mail/localhost/#public/Contacts to "index.bad"

I would recommend stopping the mailserver, adding the contact, renaming the file and restarting. However, if you can be sure that no one is currently working in this directory, you can do it with the server running.

This method could be used to programatically add a large number of contacts from mailing lists, etc. All Kerio files are text based, so similar methods can be used for Calendar events and so on.

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