[Dovecot] case (non-)sensitivity for folder names

[Phil Howard]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 16:10, Timo Sirainen <tss at iki.fi> wrote:
> On 5.1.2011, at 23.04, Phil Howard wrote:
>
>> But if for INBOX names are case IN-sensitive, then there will be
>> confusion because anything obeying that concept would see "Inbox >>
>> spam" and "Inbox >> Spam" as being the same box.
>
> It's case insensitive only for the INBOX itself, not its children. So INBOX.spam and inbox.spam are the same, but INBOX.Spam isn't the same as either of them.

Ah, I misinterpreted the original reference to be recursive.


>> The behavior I have seen, through Evolution (I just installed
>> Thunderbird and will be trying that in a while), is that when I had 3
>> existing, "foo", "Foo", and "FOO", all under inbox (seen as ".INBOX"
>> on the server, and as "Inbox" in the client), there were various
>> situations of getting things mixed up among them as if accessing one
>> would really access another, though it was unclear which.  But I
>> definitely ran into the case where when I had ONE message in each of
>> "foo", "Foo" and "FOO", and deleted the message in "foo" only, it
>> deleted one message in all three, but left the new message count on
>> "FOO" as "(1)" even though it showed now messages.
>
> I'm pretty sure this confusion comes from Evolution internally.

Given the above clarification, that appears to be the case.


>> My boss was using Apple Mail, then tried Thunderbird, and similar
>> effects are happening.  I'm wanting to believe that IMAP is just so
>> poorly defined that everyone is doing things just a bit differently,
>> and enough to sort of work, but mess things up.
>
> It's possible that multiple clients do case insensitive comparing. I doubt many people have actually tested what happens then. I only know Dovecot's code, and there's about zero possibility of it mixing up mailboxes with different casing.

Some of this might actually be more a case of how clients handle cases
where nothing is subscribed.  Apparently Thunderbird has no such mode,
and always subscribes to what it creates.  Evolution lets you run
unsubscribed, but behaves like it had some kind of phantom
subscription state.  Some things do clear up when .evolution state is
wiped clean.

I'm moving over to Thunderbird in the next day or so.

-- 
sHiFt HaPpEnS!