Chris Green wrote:
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)
Sorry, I'm not following this one. The file structure behind my new Dovecot installation is exactly the same as that used behing my Courier one - and I've rebuilt from scratch on a new box, so the structure has been created cleanly by Dovecot. This may be related to the way the Debian package has been configured, I'm not sure.
The key difference is in the display on the client. With Courier it works on the basis that the Inbox (in my Maildir directory, which contains the cur, new and tmp subdirectories for it) has all the other folders below it (stored in physical directories within the same Maildir directory, using . seperators for the folder structure as seen by the client). Dovecot on the other hand, takes all these physical directories in my Maildir folder and displays them off the root of the virtual folder tree as seen by the mail client. This to me makes sense, and although I can see that the NAMESPACE feature is defined to enable this to be flexible, I don't see an issue with setting the default action sensibly.
From the Googling I did, and playing with the settings in the various mail clients, it seems that they do support automatic setting of the Namespace - certainly Thunderbird changed this according to the server it connected to. Now the Namespace setting in the client may not be the IMAP NAMESPACE RFC setting, I've not actually managed to get my head around the spec document yet! That said, Courier sets the Personal Namespace to "INBOX." in the client and Shared Namespace to "shared.", which matches what it details in its FAQ. Dovecot sets the Personal Namespace to "" and the Shared Namespace is left blank (as I would expect not being supported yet). The physical directory structures are identical.
The key difference in physical directory structure is that with Dovecot folders that are created below the Inbox are actually defined with .INBOX. at the beginning. Folders off the root are just preceded with a .
Anyway, this may be getting OT a bit. The only issue I currently have is that I don't always get an update of the count of messages in folders that I auto file mail into with Procmail. This could be a client issue though, I've not yet investigated properly.
-- Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/