[Dovecot] Running a dovecot IMAPS server

[Bill Cole]

At 3:28 AM +0100 9/21/07, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>On Thu 20 Sep 2007, Charles Marcus wrote:
>
>>  > Incidentally, as far as I can see one has to keep a Local account
>>  > on kmail, as well as an IMAP account,
>>
>>  Dunno why it would be necessary. TBird doesn't have an easy way to lose
>>  the 'Local Folders' - maybe kmail has something similar that you are
>>  referring to? I just keep those collapsed and ignore them.
>
>There appear to be several default folders with kmail,
>namely inbox, outbox, sent-mail, wastebin, draughts, templates .

Local folders are an issue entirely local to a mail client and 
irrelevant to any IMAP server.


>>  > since eg sent mail goes to ~/Maildir/sent-mail/cur/ .
>>  > I didn't find any kmail setting to change this.

It's a very bad idea for a mail client running on the same host as an 
IMAP server to try to access the same mailstore via the filesystem. 
Maildir is a fuzzy standard: as defined it ignores a lot of things 
that users of the format want, so Maildir++ exists and various 
programs that work with Maildir mailstores  have made their own 
mostly-harmless extensions to the original structure that are not 
standardized and may not interoperate.


>>  ???
>>  'Special' folders are definable by the client - in TBird, I always use
>>  'Sent', 'Drafts', 'Templates' and 'Trash' (these are the defaults too).
>
>Maybe kmail is different ...

Apparently.

In any case, clients (KMail, Eudora, ChatterEmail, Mulberry, Outlook, 
whatever) create any particular folders that they they want to use 
for particular purposes   by telling the IMAP server to do so, and 
there is no well-defined standard for what 'special' folders exist on 
an IMAP server or how they are named or used.


>>  I still think you are missing something about how IMAP works...
>
>What exactly?

1. IMAP is not a file server protocol.

2. "What KMail does" is not a definition of any standard.

3. (Only based on your description) KMail does not seem to share much 
with common (albeit poorly standardized) IMAP client behavior.


A mailer shouldn't expect to be able to both work directly with a 
Maildir mailstore through the filesystem and with an IMAP server that 
is accessing the same mailstore.
-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com