[Dovecot] IMAP Folders Don't Make Sense

[Rick Romero]

Quoting "Carlos Williams" <carloswill at gmail.com>:

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Carlos Williams  
> <carloswill at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Rick Romero <rick at havokmon.com> wrote:
>>> Try adding a namespace.
>>>
>>> namespace private {
>>>  separator = .
>>>  prefix = INBOX.
>>>  inbox = yes
>>> }
>>
>> I made that change and reloaded Dovecot and all my users on the mail
>> server lost the folders...
>
> Sorry - I was wrong. This didn't remove anything from my server. I
> guess it helps when you issue the ls -la command. I was just being
> paranoid. My question now is how do I clean up my Maildir/ to how it
> should be?

No problem - it's the display that was changed due to the namespace config.

> Right now after the change and successfully restarting IMAP, I have
> the following directory when I login to Linux. I haven't opened up any
> mail clients yet...

Do your users have their mailboxes back?  That's the first thing.  If  
you're the only one with a funky layout, then forget yours, and get  
theirs back to normal. :)
So instead of changing the namespace, I suppose it would be better to  
conform your mailbox to what the server expects.  So I guess I'd do:

mv .INBOX.CDW .CDW
mv .INBOX.Dell .Dell
mv .INBOX.Dell.Certification .Dell.Certification
etc etc etc

Your .INBOX/ directory should contain cur/ new/ and tmp/ directories,  
where you can move/copy the individual emails into your  
~home/Maildir/cur/   new/    tmp/

Maybe you had a MUA with a .INBOX prefix set, and when you created  
your folders, it stuck that in there... ?

Rick