[Dovecot] can't see IMAP folders - Fedora Core 2

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kenneth Porter" <shiva at sewingwitch.com>
To: <dovecot at dovecot.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2004 11:21 AM
Subject: Re: [Dovecot] can't see IMAP folders - Fedora Core 2


> --On Thursday, July 15, 2004 3:20 PM +1000 David Keegel
> <djk at cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>
> > default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
>
> I just moved one of my accounts from UW-IMAP to Dovecot and am using
> Mulberry for the client. I found I had to change my "display hierarchy"
> from "account:mail/*" to "acount:*", because UW-IMAP defaults to starting
> the tree from the home directory, but Dovecot can be configured to start
> the tree from a specified directory (in the above setting, ~/mail). (This
> is a Good Thing.)
>
> (I'd already done this a few months ago for another server, but forgot the
> details.)

Yes, this lack-of-feature of UW-imapd is a design decision by Mark Crispin,
one of the primary authors of both the RFC for IMAP and the pine/imapd/popd
tools from UW. He insists, *insists*, that your mail server should be only a
mail server and never, never, never have shell or other access to it, so the
user directory on such a machine only contains mail messages.

Unfortunately, this is not how most people work n the real world: I used to
be the author of the popular patch to actually make their imapd do the sane
thing and look for mailboxes in the $HOME/mail subdirectory instead of in
$HOME. Mark's published way to fix this was to trick imapd and popd *and
pine* into thinking that your home directory was $HOME/mail, which makes
imapd and popd transfer your email from /var/spool/mail/$USER to
$HOME/mail/mbox, which breaks just about every client in the universe that
knows about the $HOME/mbox file, including pine.

Unfortunately for the UW users I threw in the towel when they rewrote that
entire chunk of code in C++. I kept that sucker updated for *six years* as
they kept switching the code base out from under me, in unnanounced
revisions published as "imap.tar.Z".

This is why I want to switch to dovecot: I can stop telling users to set up
their IMAP clients to choose the folder "~/mail" in order to see their
mailboxes and keep them un-mingled with their .bashrc, .spamassassin,
.xinitrc, etc., files.