[Dovecot] Why does dovecot confuse mutt?

[Amelia A Lewis]

Heylas,

I just switched my primary mail server from courier imap to dovecot (I've been waiting to do this; dovecot showed up in debian testing for alpha, at last).  So, using the same set of maildirs, there are slightly different behaviors.

First, of course, dovecot displays the hierarchy as I thought it ought to be, such that INBOX is a sibling of all other top-level boxes, not the parent of everything.  This is A Good Thing[tm].  That works as expected.

However, as far as mutt is concerned, *every* mailbox has child folders.  My muttrc contains the line: set folder=imap://localhost/.  (and the home folder is set to imap://localhost/INBOX; the idea is to do all mail munging through the server, never directly touching the maildirs with an MUA).  Oh, and I'm using maildir (~/Maildir).  In mutt, from the currently-selected mailbox, one can use 'c' to change boxes, and ? displays a navigable folder hierarchy.  If a folder contains only mail (no child folders), it shows up as "FolderName", if it has child folders (whether or not it has mail), it shows up as "FolderName.".  You can display the mail in a folder that has child folders, but it requires a different keystroke than the default (enter selects a folder, which means showing child folders if there are any, showing mail if there aren't; to display mail in a folder that has child folders, space).

This is tripping me up a little, because of course the commands are mostly bred into my fingertips, and it's a difficult adjustment.  I hit return, and I see a folder that contains the "child" folder "../".

Is this a glitch in mutt's handling of information that I ought to report to mutt maintainers?  Is it a glitch in dovecot's presentation of information that I ought to report to ... err, well.  *laugh*  My other primary mail client seems to cope beautifully with the information that's supplied (sylpheed, if it matters).  But then, sylpheed also coped perfectly when courier was supplying information.  I gather that courier and dovecot are reporting something slightly different, somehow, but I don't really know what, and I don't know which should be considered "correct".

Amy!