The "dot" notation for folder hierarchy doesn't matter. Its the implementation of the imap server itself as to how it handles the folder hierarchy.
When I migrated from uw-imap to courier, I patched courier so that it would show all folders at the root level rather than under INBOX, so that end-users wouldnt notice a thing during migration. There was a patch floating around on the net but its out-dated now. Involves doing your own patches now.
The hard-line stance of courier that all IMAP clients should support the IMAP NAMESPACE feature is not practical. So this is a big draw card to dovecot for me. Steve
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Green" chris@areti.co.uk To: dovecot@dovecot.org Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 8:04 PM Subject: Re: [Dovecot] Mail disappearing
On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 10:46:57PM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
Please don't scare the wotsits out of me, I've just abandoned Courier IMAP for two reasons:
- it seems incapable of handling subfolders anywhere but below the Inbox and the only help suggested is that I should ask the people writing my mail client to fix it - so that covers Microsoft (x2), Mozilla (x2), Eudora, Evolution and Squirrel mail for starters!
Of course it can't because it uses the brain-dead convention of folders all being files at the same level with '.' separators in the filenames indicating folders.
Thus a folder called 'holidays' is actually a directory called 'INBOX.holidays' and a folder called 'holidays/france' is a directory called 'INBOX.holidays.france'. Why any sort of mail server would want to construct a folder hierarchy like this I can never understand. It's not just Courier either, there are a few maildir based servers which do it.
(I'm not absolutely sure that the directories have the INBOX stuck on the front but however it's done they have to be all rooted in the same place because of the stupid idea of using '.' in the name rather than a really separate directory)
-- Chris Green (chris@areti.co.uk)
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."