[Dovecot] Running a dovecot IMAPS server

[Troy Engel]

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
> 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.]

I'm jumping in late to the game (sorry missed your original post 
somehow); my personal opinion here is that kmail is doing what I would 
call non-standard Maildir-ing, and it's causing you confusion with what 
most of us learn about Maildir in our travels.

 From what I understand via the spec and all Timo's posts, the actual 
folder format is never laid down in stone and is open to each 
implementation. However the default/accepted Maildir format as used by 
all the big boys (courier, dovecot, exim, postfix, etc.) is:

   ~/Maildir/.Family/
   ~/Maildir/.Friends/

The Maildir hierarchy that kmail is giving you is not the ad-hoc 
accepted norm; they chose to do away with the leading '.' character it 
appears (I don't use kmail). The dot-prefix format is what I call 
normal, kmail seems abnormal (in the big picture, but kmail is doing 
nothing wrong per spec!) From your above statement you believe it to be 
the reverse and that dovecot doesn't like the format -- it's not that, 
it's that dovecot was built to work out of the box with the accepted 
global norm which is a dot-prefix Maildir hierarchy.

>> With v1.1 you can do this with:
>>
>> mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
> 
> I'm not clear what this means.

I believe Timo means that in the latest code (1.1 is alpha status) he 
has added new features, and one of those features is to use the 
filesystem separator for folders. Since '/' is the standard on *nix, 
then your kmail format would magically be recognized and used without 
it's dot-prefix.

   1.0 dot-prefix: ~/Maildir/.Family.Marge/
   1.1 LAYOUT=fs:  ~/Maildir/Family/Marge/

>> 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).

You went a little too fast. :) After renaming the folder to .Family, use 
your email client to subscribe to the folder; I don't use kmail but in 
Thunderbird you rightmouse click on Inbox and choose Subscribe from the 
popup menu. Technically this places the name of the subscribed folder in 
a file named 'subscriptions' in the ~/Maildir/ directory on the server. 
Dovecot only presents the folders listed in this subscriptions file to 
the client when the client asks for a list of folders.

IMAP allows folders present on the server which are not presented to the 
client when it logs in, hence the idea of subscribing. Unsubscribed 
folders are great for archiving old stuff that you don't really need to 
see but need to keep around. By not subscribing after you renamed the 
folder to include a dot it remained invisible to your client.

hth,
-te

-- 
Troy Engel | Systems Engineer
Fluid Inc. | http://www.fluid.com