Hi, I am trying to deal with the problem, that under regular mbox format a path can lead to either a file or a directory, but not both, while under IMAP, a path is usually both, a message folder containing subfolders. I found dovecot's approach to this problem, the Maildir++ layout described under http://wiki2.dovecot.org/MboxChildFolders , and was astonished to see, what problems come with Maildir++ and how complicated dovecot tries to deal with them. I wonder why dovecot is not using a much easier approach and just uses a configurable prefix and/or suffix like .dir or ____ for directory names, e.g. INBOX -> ~/mail/inbox abc -> ~/mail/abc abc/def -> ~/mail/abc.dir/def or ~/mail/___abc___/def which would make all that trouble with .subscriptions and .index much more easier. In my eyes the Maildir++ layout is overcomplicated because of the heap of workarounds to the self-created problems. regards Hadmut