[Dovecot] Two newbie problems

[Timothy Murphy]

I've started running dovecot on my server under Fedora 7,
to act as an IMAPS server for kmail.

1.  I see my email fine on my laptop in an IMAPS account,
but it doesn't get updated - I mean I don't get any new email -
until I run kmail on my server.
This isn't a great problem, as I am always logged to the server with ssh,
and I just start kmail and stop it after a few minutes.
Then I run kmail on my laptop, and the new mail is there.

But I assume this is not the intended system?

2. I opted (probably mistakenly) to set ~/Mail/inbox/
as my base IMAPS directory on my server.
I'd like to change this to ~/Maildir
(I use maildir folders).
Is it relatively easy to do this?

I tried copying my email to ~/Maildir/
and changing the setting in /etc/dovecot.conf
(and restarting dovecot),
but for some reason I could not see the email on my laptop.

Any advice or suggestions gratefully received.