[Dovecot] Dovecot -- basic setup

[Tom]

Hey all,

After some kind soul made me understand what I can expect from Dovecot,
I feel really embarassed for not being able to set it up correctly.

What I already had was ~/Mail, containing about six maildirs. Exim got
mail, delivered it to procmail, and procmail dropped it in my inbox; a
needless extra step that I keep for future, ehm, needs that I might
start to care about when I can just succesfully use the most basic mail
configuration I can think of.

As far as I understood, I just have to point Dovecot to my maildir for
it to serve my mail when I connect appropriately with a client. When I
test that with KMail connecting to localhost, I get a bizarre overview
of my mailfolders, that looks like this:

http://www.xs4all.be/~verbreyt/img/scrots/dovecot-kmail.jpg

The error message on top is what I get when I try to catch up with any
possible new mail: "Unable to get information about folder
antwort.index. The server replied: Internal error." Syslog says
"lstat(/home/tom/Mail/.antwort.index/cur) failed: Not a directory".
Could be, of course: the directory should be ~/Mail/antwort/cur. After
I ran KMail and got those errors, ~/Mail, previously only containing
some folders, each in turn containing cur/, new/ and tmp/, is
stuffed with index files, and three new folders (cur/, new/ and tmp/)
directly in the toplevel.

#####

$ ls -a Mail
.                   .drafts.index.ids    .sent.index.ids
..                  inbox                sent-mail
antwort             .INBOX               .sent-mail.index
.antwort.index      .inbox.index         .sent-mail.index.ids
.antwort.index.ids  .inbox.index.ids     spam
check               .inbox.index.sorted  .spam.index
.check.index        new                  .spam.index.ids
.check.index.ids    outbox               tmp
cur                 .outbox.index        trash
.customflags        .outbox.index.ids    .trash.index
drafts              sent                 .trash.index.ids
.drafts.index       .sent.index

#####

I'm not sure just where it all goes wrong. Yes, I feel stupid about that,
but what did, then, did I misunderstand? The only relevant thing in
/etc/dovecot.conf I guess would be "default_mail_env" which I have set to
"maildir:~/Mail:INBOX=~/Mail/inbox".

Documentation may be sparse, it'd still make me sad to be the cause of
it being extended for use by the clueless. :-/

Grateful for any corrections,
Tom

-- 
"Mongolian drivers do not care much about pedestrians."
--
np: Predominance - Luftschiffe (flac)