[Dovecot] newbie: problem with IMAPS + mutt + Thunderbird

[Toni Mueller]

Hi,

I'm a Dovecot newbie and have some problems with the configuration/the
resulting interoperability. My setup looks like this:

I receive my mail using qmail-ldap and sort it with a number of means
into

  ~/Mailbox/ (= INBOX) and
  ~/Mail/folder/ for various values of 'folder' (generally one folder
  per mailing list).

The sorting is done via .qmail-* files, LDAP entries, and procmail
(this is a "legacy" setup that I'd rather not change too much).

I usually access my mail using 'mutt' on the local machine (Debian
4.0), and everything is fine. I'd like to be able to access the same
email using Thunderbird over IMAPS as well, to gain foreign character
support (ie, Chinese), while continuing to use mutt as my main MUA.


There are, so far, two problems with this setup:

1. I can't find the folders in ~/Mail/. As an interim solution, I
   symlinked them from my ~/Mailbox/ dir, but this is _dead_ugly_.

2. (MUCH more serious) As soon as I access the email using Thunderbird,
   Dovecot moves all new mail from

   somefolder/new to somefolder/cur, thereby making mutt flag all my
   new mail as 'O' ("old") which was flagged 'N' ("new") before.

   If I remember which the new mails were, I can flag them as 'N' in
   mutt, and they get moved to .../new again, but this isn't usually
   the case because my mailboxen are often large (> 10.000 messages),
   and it's undone as soon as I access the mailbox with Thunderbird
   (over IMAPS).


I also have a wish list. Both Mutt and Dovecot (can) make use of index
files to speed mail access. It would be great if this could be unified
so that both programs use the same index files (in a consistent manner,
of course).


The software versions I currently use are these:

Mutt:  1.5.17+2008011
Dovecot: 1.0.13-1~bpo40
Thunderbird: 1.5.0.13+1.5.0


Dovecot configuration:

log_timestamp: %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S 
protocols: imaps
ssl_listen: 10.10.10.1:993
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/lib/dovecot/imap-login
login_processes_count: 2
login_max_processes_count: 20
max_mail_processes: 30
first_valid_uid: 2000
first_valid_gid: 2000
mail_location: maildir:~/Mail:INBOX=~/Mailbox/
mail_debug: yes
auth default:
  verbose: yes
  passdb:
    driver: ldap
    args: /etc/dovecot/dovecot-ldap.conf
  userdb:
    driver: ldap
    args: /etc/dovecot/dovecot-ldap.conf




Kind regards,
--Toni++