[Dovecot] Running a dovecot IMAPS server

[Timothy Murphy]

Timo Sirainen wrote:

>> 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?
> 
>> It seems to me that this is an issue likely to be faced by anyone
>> wanting to run a small home network.
>> reading email on various machines,
>> and wanting this email to be kept "in sync".
> 
> If you use only IMAP, there should be no problem.

Just a note to say I have everything working fine now.
As suggested, I am basically using IMAP for everything.

Looking back, there were two problems.

Firstly, for some reason I kept getting a warning
that the "resource .INBOX.directory" could not be found
(this is not the exact message).

Secondly, it took an extraordinarily long time
for the IMAPS directory on my laptop to appear.
In fact, it only appeared (to my surprise)
when I re-booted the laptop after several hours.
I take it that this was somehow related
to SSL or TSL authentication.

I found that I had to move my old ~/Maildir/Folder/cur/*
messages "by hand" to the IMAP folder created by kmail
at ~/Maildir/.Folder/new/ ;
kmail did not allow me to move messages from a Local folder
to an IMAP folder, although it saw both.

Incidentally, as far as I can see one has to keep a Local account
on kmail, as well as an IMAP account,
since eg sent mail goes to ~/Maildir/sent-mail/cur/ .
I didn't find any kmail setting to change this.
Also, I assume it is sensible to leave the trash folder
on the local machine.

One tiny query; my .procmailrc has DEFAULT set to
$HOME/Maildir/ ,which seems to work fine.
Someone suggested it should be set to $HOME/Maildir/new/ ?

In any case, dovecot IMAPS is working perfectly now, as I said.
Thank you very much for what seems an excellent program.
I had previously tried to set up a Cyrus IMAP server,
but for one reason or another this did not work
(under Fedora 7).