[Dovecot] Folders within folders?

[Curtis Maloney]

ed beers wrote:
> I'm trying to migrate my emails from an existing server (University of 
> Washington IMAP toolkit) to dovecot.  My clients are all using Thunderbird.
> 
> I'm moving to a new Ubuntu based server (old one was Centos4) and 
> selected dovecot solely because it was the default option.  I'm not 
> committed to it if it isn't the right tool for my application.

I very much doubt Dovecot is not the right tool for the job, if IMAP is what 
you're after :)

> My existing server allows hierarchical folders and these are used to 
> organize 20 years worth of carefully sorted emails.
> I can create a new folders on the dovecot server but Thunderbird 
> doesn't  allow me to create new sub-folders within them.  I think T-bird 
> is configured OK since this works on the old server.
> 
> Is this a dovecot limitation or have I configured it incorrectly?

This is a mail store limitation, somewhat.

If you've opted for mbox, things can be tricky.  I've found for one server I 
use I have to create folders with a trailing / in order to be able to create 
sub-folders in them.  However, they then can not contain messages as well.

Maildir does not suffer this limitation, as it doesn't use a hierarchy of 
filesystem directories to denote mail folders.  Each folder is its own 
directory.

-- 
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney at cardgate.net