At 1:55 PM +0100 9/17/07, Timothy Murphy imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
On Mon 17 Sep 2007, Bill Cole wrote:
At 2:45 AM +0100 9/17/07, Timothy Murphy wrote:
I'd be really grateful if someone running a dovecot IMAP (or IMAPS) server could tell me exactly how their email folders are arranged.
Beware. You are asking to have other people tell you who you are. That usually does not work well.
Non capisco.
Dovecot is highly configurable for a reason: mail systems can be widely variable in design and complexity. Different sites have different needs, different admins have different whims.
To some extent, how you set up a mail system is an expression of your needs, your users' needs, and your personality.
~/Maildir/new is where Postfix delivers new messages. ~Maildir/cur is where dovecot moves messages that it has seen. My mail clients do all the work for moving some messages to subdirectories in the maildir tree.
Where exactly do they move email to?
They tell Dovecot to move them to other logical mailboxes. Those are implemented as additional Maildir-format directories inside ~/Maildir.
http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir describes the way dovecot implements the Maildir++ quasi-standard.
I don't think so. I just looked again at this document, but I'm afraid I find it more or less useless.
That's a terrible shame. You probably don't need to understand everything on that page, but it and the linked pages describing the Maildir structure answer everything you've asked.
A concrete example of an actual mail setup and how this is seen by an IMAP client would have been much more useful, in my view.
Aside from creating the top-level Maildir directory and telling whatever your delivery agent is where to find it (and perhaps telling Dovecot, if it is a strange place...), you don't need to set any of the Maildir structure up or go digging into it on the filesystem level. Dovecot presents an Inbox to IMAP clients, and IMAP clients can tell Dovecot to create whatever logical directory structures the user wants.
Of course, if you use a storage format other than Maildir then the answers are all different.
-- Bill Cole bill@scconsult.com