----- Original Message ----- From: "Kenneth Porter" shiva@sewingwitch.com To: dovecot@dovecot.org Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2004 11:21 AM Subject: Re: [Dovecot] can't see IMAP folders - Fedora Core 2
--On Thursday, July 15, 2004 3:20 PM +1000 David Keegel djk@cybersource.com.au wrote:
default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
I just moved one of my accounts from UW-IMAP to Dovecot and am using Mulberry for the client. I found I had to change my "display hierarchy" from "account:mail/*" to "acount:*", because UW-IMAP defaults to starting the tree from the home directory, but Dovecot can be configured to start the tree from a specified directory (in the above setting, ~/mail). (This is a Good Thing.)
(I'd already done this a few months ago for another server, but forgot the details.)
Yes, this lack-of-feature of UW-imapd is a design decision by Mark Crispin, one of the primary authors of both the RFC for IMAP and the pine/imapd/popd tools from UW. He insists, *insists*, that your mail server should be only a mail server and never, never, never have shell or other access to it, so the user directory on such a machine only contains mail messages.
Unfortunately, this is not how most people work n the real world: I used to be the author of the popular patch to actually make their imapd do the sane thing and look for mailboxes in the $HOME/mail subdirectory instead of in $HOME. Mark's published way to fix this was to trick imapd and popd *and pine* into thinking that your home directory was $HOME/mail, which makes imapd and popd transfer your email from /var/spool/mail/$USER to $HOME/mail/mbox, which breaks just about every client in the universe that knows about the $HOME/mbox file, including pine.
Unfortunately for the UW users I threw in the towel when they rewrote that entire chunk of code in C++. I kept that sucker updated for *six years* as they kept switching the code base out from under me, in unnanounced revisions published as "imap.tar.Z".
This is why I want to switch to dovecot: I can stop telling users to set up their IMAP clients to choose the folder "~/mail" in order to see their mailboxes and keep them un-mingled with their .bashrc, .spamassassin, .xinitrc, etc., files.