[Dovecot] IMAP - many folders?

[alan premselaar]

Piotr Krukowiecki wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2004 at 12:29:13PM +0900, alan premselaar wrote:
> 
>>Piotr Krukowiecki wrote:
>>
>>>I have following setup: new mail goes to ~/Mail/Maildir, except for
>>>mailing lists which are moved by procmail to ~/Mail/mailing_lists/name,
>>>spam which goes to ~/Mail/spam. Read mail is moved by mutt to ~/Mail/read. 
>>>Everything is in maildir format.
>>
>>  do you want your users to see their own directory heirarchy as 
>>explained above? or to see your folders specifically?
>>
>>if you want them to see their own folders in their home mail heirarchy, 
>>then you need to make sure your mail client is configured to access 
>>them. This is handled by subscriptions and some mail clients will 
>>auto-subscribe to all existing folders the first time it connects to a 
>>server (i.e. you setup the account) and some don't and you need to 
>>specifically tell the client to subscribe.
>>
>>This sounds like what your problem may be.  which mail client are you using?
> 
> 
> Personally I'm using mutt. Some users use Mozilla, some pine, some MS
> something. I'll tell you how I "use" my mail.
> 
> When I use mutt from the computer which holds the mail (thorough ssh), I
> usually use "c<tab>" and get a listing of ~/Mail/ directory, which looks
> e.g. like this: (cut to fit the screen)
> [...]
>  2     drwxr-xr-x  [...]     168 Nov 18 08:47 mailing_lists/
>  3     drwxr-xr-x  [...]     224 Nov 18 08:06 debian_mailing_list 
>  4     drwx------  [...]     120 Nov 17 18:36 Maildir/
> [...]
> 
> I can see the last changed date, which allows me to see when was the last
> mail delivered.
> 
> Then I can e.g. change to do mailing_lists dir and see directories there
> etc. untill i choose a maildir or mbox item.
> 
> I haven't been using imap/pop at all yet, but I suppose when using it
> I'd like to be able to do the same, but from home. I.e. using mutt to
> list directories on remote imap server. I'm not sure if it can be done?
> 
> If not, then at least I'd like to be able to access e.g. Maildir,
> mailing_lists/dovecot ;) and some others configured folders.
> The problem here is that even if I pass mailing_lists/dovecot as
> accessed folder the dovecot(?) changes "/" to ".". I've read that I'd have
> to change the slash to dot in dovecot sources - is is very hard to do?
> 
> I think that other users will use other means of reading their mail, but
> I still belive that "/" approach is better then the "." one.
> 
> 
Piotr,

   the '.' character is used as an IMAP delimiter used by dovecot (and 
some other IMAP servers, although it's been awhile since i've used 
others so I don't remember which off the top of my head)

so, if you want sub folders to show up in your IMAP client, you'll need 
a heirarchy similar to (assuming you're using Maildir format, each of 
these directories will have 3 additional sub-directories called cur/ 
new/ and tmp/):

~/Maildir/.INBOX/
~/Maildir/.some_folder/
~/Maildir/.some_folder.sub_folder/

etc.

this will show up as:

INBOX
some_folder
\_sub_folder

in your IMAP client (i'm not familiar with mutt or its IMAP 
capabilities, but for example thunderbird will work this way)


hope this helps

alan