Namespaces: a developer view
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Since Cyrus allows dot characters in the mailbox names, one may have a
naming convention that leads user *John Doe* to hold an email address
of "john.doe@example.org". The internal representation of this mailbox
is "example.org!user.john^doe".

Note:

  A second user mailbox, if shared with *Uhura*, would present itself
  to *Uhura* as being in the Other Users Namespace, but the internal
  representation of it remains the same.

The namespace mode does NOT change the rules governing the behavior of
mailboxes or how mailboxes are stored on the filesystem. The mailboxes
are ALWAYS stored with dot hierarchy separators. When configured to
use the different modes and separators, the server translates mailbox
names between the internal names and the external names when used by
the client in the IMAP protocol and in Sieve scripts.

This design allows the namespace to be changed at runtime (even on a
running server) without having to reconfigure the server. This also
means that one mailstore can support different namespaces.