[Dovecot] mdbox: Cannot create subfolder called "dbox-Mails" (2.0beta5)

[Timo Sirainen]

On to, 2010-05-13 at 10:14 +0100, William Blunn wrote:

> So this means we cannot create a mail subfolder whose name is "dbox-Mails"!

Yes. That's why it's called dbox-Mails, it's unlikely people will want
to try to create it :)

> I concede that this eventuality may be unlikely, but when designing in a 
> green field, surely we should avoid such obvious pitfalls?
> 
> Surely we would want to make it so that these objects exist in different 
> namespaces, so that mail folders can be created with any name?

Those conflict with how people often want to manage mailboxes on
filesystem..

> So perhaps the directory "dbox-Mails" should use a character in its name 
> which could not be used in mail folder names.

Only such characters are control characters. Admins wouldn't be very
happy with those. Maybe some filesystems wouldn't allow them either (I
know OSX has some limitations).

> Or mail folder names could have a non-identity mapping into directory 
> names such that the directory name can never be "dbox-Mails".

There could be some escaping, but just to allow dbox-Mails mailbox name
that seems overly complex.

The final solution in future would be to prefer using mailbox GUIDs as
the directory names. This fixes some other bugs as well related to
swapping one mailbox to another while it's already open in one session.
But it also pretty much requires mailbox list indexes, so it's not
possible yet.