[Dovecot] What is your dovecot setup?
Bill Cole
dovecot-20061108 at billmail.scconsult.com
Tue Sep 18 03:05:06 EEST 2007
At 1:55 PM +0100 9/17/07, Timothy Murphy imposed structure on a
stream of electrons, yielding:
>On Mon 17 Sep 2007, Bill Cole wrote:
>
>> At 2:45 AM +0100 9/17/07, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> >I'd be really grateful if someone running a dovecot IMAP (or IMAPS) server
>> >could tell me exactly how their email folders are arranged.
>>
>> Beware. You are asking to have other people tell you who you are.
>> That usually does not work well.
>
>Non capisco.
Dovecot is highly configurable for a reason: mail systems can be
widely variable in design and complexity. Different sites have
different needs, different admins have different whims.
To some extent, how you set up a mail system is an expression of your
needs, your users' needs, and your personality.
>> ~/Maildir/new is where Postfix delivers new messages. ~Maildir/cur is
>> where dovecot moves messages that it has seen. My mail clients do all
>> the work for moving some messages to subdirectories in the maildir
>> tree.
>
>Where exactly do they move email to?
They tell Dovecot to move them to other logical mailboxes. Those are
implemented as additional Maildir-format directories inside ~/Maildir.
>> http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir describes the way
>> dovecot implements the Maildir++ quasi-standard.
>
>I don't think so.
>I just looked again at this document,
>but I'm afraid I find it more or less useless.
That's a terrible shame. You probably don't need to understand
everything on that page, but it and the linked pages describing the
Maildir structure answer everything you've asked.
>A concrete example of an actual mail setup
>and how this is seen by an IMAP client
>would have been much more useful, in my view.
Aside from creating the top-level Maildir directory and telling
whatever your delivery agent is where to find it (and perhaps telling
Dovecot, if it is a strange place...), you don't need to set any of
the Maildir structure up or go digging into it on the filesystem
level. Dovecot presents an Inbox to IMAP clients, and IMAP clients
can tell Dovecot to create whatever logical directory structures the
user wants.
Of course, if you use a storage format other than Maildir then the
answers are all different.
--
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com
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