[Dovecot] Running a dovecot IMAPS server

[Timothy Murphy]

Timo Sirainen wrote:

>> > Dovecot has both mbox and Maildir format support.
>> 
>> I find the statement that dovecot has maildir format support misleading.
>> 
>> By maildir support, I mean that mail is contained in directories
>> ~/Maildir/inbox/[cur,new,tmp], ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp],
>> ~/Maildir/Finance/[cur,new,tmp], etc.
> 
> That's one way to implement multiple mailboxes to Maildir format, but
> there's no such standard.

First of all, thank you for responding, and (more importantly) for dovecot.

I wasn't suggesting that the maildir format I described was "standard",
just that it is the one you will get if you set up an email system
using kmail in the usual way.

It could therefore be described as a "normal" maildir format;
and if dovecot does not like this format,
I think this should be explained clearly in the dovecot documentation.
[I didn't find the Maildir vs Maildir++ account very illuminating.]

>> As far as I can see, if you now set up an IMAP server using dovecot
>> on this machine, setting
>> mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir/
>> in /etc/dovecot.conf
>> then the email in the folders Family, Finance, etc
>> will not be seen by an IMAP client.
> 
> With v1.1 you can do this with:
> 
> mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs

I'm not clear what this means.
Dovecot-1.1 has not yet come to Fedora 7, which I use,
but I would be more than happy to compile it,
if you are saying that I could then stick with my present mail setup 
on my server?

>> To clarify my question, suppose one has email organised in server X
>> as described above, in directories ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp/ , etc.
>> And now suppose one wants to access this email from laptop Y.
>> How exactly does one have to change the setup on machine X?
>> And what does one set mail_location to?
> 
> Why do you want it to work like that? Can't you just use the Maildir++
> layout and use the email only via IMAP?

I would be quite happy to do this,
but when I tried briefly re-naming ~/Maildir/Family/ to ~/Maildir/.Family/
on my server and re-started dovecot it did not seem to work -
I did not see the Family folder on my client (using IMAPS).

I wonder if I could press you to say exactly how I should change the setup
on the server, and also how I should define mail_location in dovecot.conf ,
and what I should set DEFAULT to in .procmailrc ?
Or point me to some location where this is set out -
I didn't find any explicit instructions like this in the dovecot wiki.