On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 00:27 -0400, Bill Cole wrote:
At 8:36 PM -0700 4/17/08, David Benfell wrote:
(reduced to the key pieces of information.)
dovecot: 2008-04-17 20:24:51 Error: IMAP(benfell): Ambiguous mail location setting, don't know what to do with it: /home/benfell/imap-folders (try prefixing it with mbox: or maildir:)
[...]
namespace: type: private separator: / prefix: folders/ location: ~/imap-folders
Apply the clue in the log line to the namespace 'location' parameter.
Once again, thanks. I was trying to understand the configuration file and I guess that just didn't work. But I still seemed to be missing something.
I wanted to get it to recognize my existing folders. I created a test folder and saw that in the actual file space, dovecot uses periods to separate layers of the hierarchy, and that the folder name at the top of the hierarchy also begins with a period.
If this is the case, I'm not sure what defining "/" as a separator is for.
So, though I'm not much of script writer, I created a script to go through and set symbolic links to those folders (Maildirs):
#!/usr/bin/zsh
cd ${HOME}/imap
find . -type d | grep -v "\/\."
| grep -v "\/tmp$"
| grep -v "\/cur$"
| grep -v "\/new$" | while read folder
do
target=$(print "${folder}"|sed 's_/_._'g|sed 's_\.\._._'g)
if [[ ! -e "${target}" ]]
then
ln -s "${folder}" "${target}"
ls -al "${target}"
fi
done
It still didn't appear to work. There are thousands of these folders in a nested hierarchy, because I rotate mail folders by year, month, and--in some cases--day. Thus, not only do I need to get these folders recognized initially, but I have an ongoing automatic process that generates new folders daily, that I want dovecot to also recognize.
So about the time I was just about to fire this off, evolution greyed out. When it came back, I could see that it was going through my folders. I sure hope it doesn't have to go through all *this* every time, because it is taking a while.
-- David Benfell dbenfell@gmail.com