[Dovecot] where is subscribed list stored?

[Timo Sirainen]

On 22.1.2012, at 15.55, Michael Makuch wrote:

> I use dovecot locally for internal only access to my email archives, of which I have many gigs of email archives. Over time I end up subscribing to a couple dozen different IMAP email folders. Problem is that periodically my list of subscribed folders get zapped to none, and I have to go and re-subscribe to a dozen or two folders again.
> 
> Anyone seen this happen? It looks like the list of subscribed folders is here ~/Mail/.subscriptions and I can see in my daily backup that it reflects what appears in TBird. What might be zapping it? I use multiple email clients simultaneously on different hosts. (IOW I leave them open) Is this a problem? Does dovecot manage that in some way? Or is that my problem? I don't think this is the problem since this only occurs like a few times per year. If it were the problem I'd expect it to occur much more frequently.

No idea, but you could prevent it by making sure that it can't change the subscriptions:

mail_location = mbox:~/Mail:CONTROL=~/mail-subscriptions

mkdir ~/mail-subscriptions
mv ~/Mail/.subscriptions ~/mail-subscriptions
chmod 0500 ~/mail-subscriptions

I thought Dovecot would also log an error if client tried to change subscriptions, but looks like it doesn't. It only returns failure to client:

a unsubscribe INBOX
a NO [NOPERM] No permission to modify subscriptions