[Dovecot] Maildir folder separator

Vince Valenti vince at blue-box.net
Wed Aug 23 04:11:06 EEST 2006


On Tue, August 22, 2006 4:58 pm, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> Does this character ever show up in UI's? Do end users even need to know
> about it? If not, can it be outside the printable set? If so, a vertical
> tab might be a good default.

I don't believe the user ever sees the folder separator.  However, it
would be nice to have a 'typable' character so when you're dealing with
the filesystem hierarchy from a shell, it would be easier to view and
navigate.

I vote for a configuration file option.  I'm not sure how feasible it
would be to change the default at this point since it would break
everyone's existing installations.

The Maildir++ documentation at
http://www.inter7.com/courierimap/README.maildirquota.html shows an
example of a colon being the separator:

"Can folders have subfolders, defined in a recursive fashion? The answer
is no. If you want to have a client with a hierarchy of folders, emulate
it. Pick a hierarchy separator character, say ":". Then, folder foo/bar is
subdirectory .foo:bar."

A tilde might work well also.  The directory on the disk could be called
".Folder1~Folder2~Folder3".

I don't normally create folders with dots in them, but there have been
times in the past when I've tried to and couldn't.

-Vince



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