[PLUG] IMAP "public folders"

[gilmanhunt at comcast.net]

This smells to my semi-experienced sinuses like a kludge. So I'm asking if
there's a better way to do this.

Here's what we're trying to do. We're "upgrading" our accounting software to
something that uses Windows. Many (about 30) of our users are going to be
replacing their MacIntoshes with Windows computers.  Their email is currently
Outlook Express and/or Entourage, accessing the (thankfully) Linux mail server
with the POP protocol.  We want to duplicate the contents of the Mac's inbox on
the PC in whatever they're using on the PC (probably, again, outlook).

Not finding any conversion utilities for mac->windows outlook inboxes, we're
looking at a solution that involves: creating an imap "public folder", copying
the mac inbox to the public folder, copying the public folder to the PC inbox.

I can't find anything related to an "imap public folder" in documents for the UW
Imap daemon. Cyrus is ... closer, but I don't want to install cyrus for such a
temporary fix.

Here's what I've found, though;
I can create a file and change the permissions to 666, and then hard link it
into a user's ~/Mail/ directory, and bingo, the Mac version of "mail.app" sees
it as a folder and will move stuff to it and out of it, and said stuff is
visible (and read/writable) by all other people that have links to it. I can see
uses for that, but, frankly, this is what smells like a kludge. There's no
documentation for it, there's no configuration files for it like Samba might have.

What should I be doing here?

~Russ