[Dovecot] Setting up mixed mbox and maildir

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

On Wed, 2012-06-27 at 17:30 +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On 27.6.2012, at 0.19, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> 
> >> If you are working with 2.0 or later dovecot, you should be at
> >> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Namespaces
> > 
> > I am using 2.1.7 .  I surmise from this Namespace page that the form:
> > 	namespace <type> {
> > where <type> is one of "public", "private", or "shared" creates an
> > unnamed namespace of type <type> while the form:
> > 	namespace <name> {
> > where <name> is none of "public", "private", or "shared", creates a
> > namespace with the name <name> and the default type (unspecified on this
> > page, but probably private).  
> 
> I don't see any of that in the wiki2 page. Maybe you were looking at wiki1 page.

Quite right; this comes from a reading of pages in both wiki1 and wiki2.
I now surmise that this isn't a good idea since wiki1 describes v1.x
and wiki2 describes v2.x, which have different syntaxes (syntaces?).  Is
all this correct?

> > The namespace can be given the type
> > desired by an (undocumented) namespace setting:
> > 	namespace inbox (
> > 		type = <type>
> > Is this correct?
> 
> It's mentioned in examples :) Yeah, could be more clearly mentioned in
> the wiki page too. Of course it's already in the
> example-config/conf.d/10-mail.conf file. The <name> part in namespace
> <name> { } should also be in the wiki page, although that's not
> namespace-specific thing at all, but works everywhere in dovecot.conf.
> It simply gives a (human-readable) name for the namespace within the
> configuration, it doesn't actually do anything.

It looks like it does *something*, since 15-mailboxes.conf contains the lines:
	# NOTE: Assumes "namespace inbox" has been defined in 10-mail.conf.
	namespace inbox {

I am continuing to attempt to set up dovecot to keep its mail store in maildir
form while receiving it from an mbox, but without success.  Dovecot reports the
error that it can't create the file ~/mail/.imap/INBOX (and also that it can't
chown it to user mail, not surprising since it doesn't exist).  This seems 
reasonable, since jonrysh (that is me) is not a member of the group mail.  What
should be done next?  Should I join the group mail?  It seems that this should
not be necessary in general.  The mail store is in ~/maildir, so what is the 
function of the mbox ~/mail?  

Dovecot must be misconfigured, but it's not clear to a newbie like myself 
what's wrong.  Any advice would be appreciated.  I have attached an extract
from maillog showing the errors (dovecot.log) dovecot reports (dovecot.log),
and the output of dovecot -n (dovecot-n).

Thanks for your help - jon


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# 2.1.7: /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
# OS: Linux 3.4.3-1.fc17.x86_64 x86_64 Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) 
mail_debug = yes
mail_privileged_group = mail
managesieve_notify_capability = mailto
managesieve_sieve_capability = fileinto reject envelope encoded-character vacation subaddress comparator-i;ascii-numeric relational regex imap4flags copy include variables body enotify environment mailbox date ihave
mbox_write_locks = fcntl
namespace data {
  location = maildir:~/Dovecot
  prefix = 
  separator = .
}
namespace inbox {
  hidden = yes
  inbox = yes
  list = no
  location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
  mailbox Drafts {
    special_use = \Drafts
  }
  mailbox Junk {
    special_use = \Junk
  }
  mailbox Sent {
    special_use = \Sent
  }
  mailbox "Sent Messages" {
    special_use = \Sent
  }
  mailbox Trash {
    special_use = \Trash
  }
  prefix = "#mbox."
  separator = .
  type = private
}
passdb {
  driver = pam
}
plugin {
  sieve = ~/.dovecot.sieve
  sieve_dir = ~/sieve
}
ssl = required
ssl_cert = </etc/pki/dovecot/certs/dovecot.pem
ssl_key = </etc/pki/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem
userdb {
  driver = passwd
}