I have always used a pop3 daemon, and switching to dovecot has been my introduction to imap. Imap is foreign to me.
I am wondering if I am a little off-track here, and would like some clarification.
My MTA (exim) delivers email to: /mail/user dovecot, sucks that mail from /mail/user TO /home/user/mail/<filenamesoffolders> dovecot IMAP further uses /home/user/mail/.imap/folders/{.index / .index.cache / .index.log}
the mail folder which exim uses doesn't seem to get emptied by dovecot when it sucks the email into /home/user/mail/<filenamesoffolders> when using IMAP. If POP3 is used via dovecot, then it appears that the interaction is directly to the original exim folder and that it does indeed empty (or at least it has the "FOLDER INTERNAL DATA" entry).
I suppose my question is, is there a way to have dovecot empty/parse the original exim mailbox so that the customer email isn't sitting in two spots, taking up double the space. This would be in the IMAP environment only, as POP3 seems to be fine.
Any online references available to help a newbee understand IMAP?
Thanks!