[Dovecot] getting Apple Mail and dovecot/IMAP to co-operate

[Jim Reid]

On 8 Jul 2009, at 18:08, Timo Sirainen wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 17:58 +0100, Jim Reid wrote:
>> Hi. I've been fighting a losing battle to get Apple Mail and dovecot
>> to play nice. When dovecot is told to use mbox-style mailboxes, it's
>> not possible to create child mailboxes. Apple Mail whines "The IMAP
>> command “CREATE” failed with server error: Mailbox doesn't allow
>> inferior mailboxes.". I've looked through the documentation, the wiki
>> and searched the mail archives without finding a solution. Can anyone
>> help?
>
> If you want to create e.g. "sub/box", start from nothing. Don't create
> "sub". Give the mailbox name as "sub/box". The "sub" then can't have
> messages, but it can have other child mailboxes.

Thanks for the quick response Timo. Sadly, your suggestion doesn't  
look as if it'll work because there are many non-empty parent  
mailboxes that have to get shifted to the new dovecot server. ie There  
are messages in sub as well as sub/box: too many to move to sub/ 
whatever. And there are many of these sorts of folders too. Some  
mailboxes are even more deeply nested with subfolders: sub/box1/box2  
where sub/box1 holds messages. Looks like an all-mbox solution isn't  
going to be viable at all. Oh well.

>> I've tried (and failed) to get a hybrid maildir/mbox setup to work
>> like that shown on http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces. When that gets
>> plugged into dovecot.conf, Apple Mail blocks, with the Activity  
>> window
>> saying "waiting for login" or something like that, even though a  
>> valid
>> imaps connection and login has been established.
>
> I don't really know about that. What kind of a namespace configuration
> exactly did you use?

Here's the last one I tried before hitting a dead end. There were  
various combinations of settings for the prefix, hidden and list  
variables that were tried unsuccessfully before that.

###namespace private {
###  separator = /
###  #prefix = "#mbox/"
###  location = mbox:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
###  inbox = yes
###  #hidden = yes
###  list = no   # for v1.1+
###}
###namespace private {
###  separator = /
###  prefix =
###  location = maildir:/mail/imap/$u:LAYOUT=fs
###  inbox = no
###  list = yes
###}