[Dovecot] Slightly OT : Maildir format (silly) questions

[Jakob Hirsch]

Thomas Hummel wrote:

> I was asking what was the motivation for not having the envelope From in the
> Maildir format, as defined in the qmail spec :
> 
> "The message is delivered without an extra UUCP-
>  style From_ line, without any >From quoting, and without an
>  extra blank line at the end."
> 
> which may sound silly since we lose an important piece of information.

You can always add an extra header that contains what you want. (Exim's 
default for that is Return-path:). The From_ line in mbox is used as a 
message delimiter. AFAIK it's not even treated like a header, so it's 
not sent to the (POP3/IMAP-)MUA.

> Same question about the motivation in Courrier (Maildir++)  for emulating a
> hierarchy for subfolders (like in .folder.subfolder.subsubfolder) instead of
> (note : I know about layout=FS, I'm not talking about that) implementing a real
> filesystem hierarchy.

Don't know about that, probably better to ask Sam Varshavchik on the 
Courier list.
One reason probably is because it's easier to get a complete folder list 
by scanning a single folder than recursively scanning all folders.
The starting dot '.' is clear, I guess, otherwise you couldn't have 
folders named cur, new and tmp.