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I'm trying to convert a courier-imap installation over to using
Dovecot, but I'm having some problems with Mail.app on OS X. FTR, we
use both Mail.app and Thunderbird. Note that in the Mail.app
preferences, I have a blank IMAP Path Prefix. I'm using Dovecot
1.0_rc15 on Gentoo, and Mail.app from OS X 10.4.8, Thunderbird 1.5.0.9.
With the old courier setup, in Mail.app I would see a top level Inbox
folder, with an inbox icon'd folder underneath that representing the
IMAP account. That IMAP account subfolder would be the inbox of that
account. Under that, I'd see all the subfolders for that account.
Something like:
Inbox Account1 Folder1 Folder2 ... Account2 FolderA Outbox Drafts Sent Junk SmartFolder1 SmartFolder2
Note that a straight copy from the courier Maildir leaves me with
directories like ~/Maildir/.Folder1 and ~/Maildir/.Folder2 -- IOW,
they do not have .INBOX. prefix. I tried adding a "namespace
private" section, with separator, prefix, and inbox values as
specified in the docs.
This gives me the same layout in the Mail.app u/i as with Courier,
but there's a big problem: none of the folders under Account1 have
any contents. The folders are there, and in the right location, but
they have zero messages (even though they certainly have messages in
the filesystem). Nothing in the Dovecot log file indicates any
problem. But if I hover over say Folder1 in the Mail.app u/i, I see
a popup message like:
Mail was unable to open this mailbox on the server "imap.example.com". The server error encountered was: Unknown namespace
Moving over to Thunderbird though, I see exactly what I want to see.
Top level expandable is the account, with Inbox under that, which
expands to all my folders. Of course Thunderbird supports
subscriptions, which Mail.app does not, so I only see the folders
I've subscribed to. Clearly, there's some weird interaction between
Mail.app and Dovecot.
Next, I tried removing the 'prefix' value from the "namespace
private" section, and restarted Dovecot. Now the Mail.app u/i is
different, but all the folders have their contents back! The u/i now
shows:
Inbox Account1 Account2 FolderA Outbox Drafts Sent Junk SmartFolder1 SmartFolder2 Account1 Folder1 Folder2
IOW, all of account1's folders live under a separate expandable
section below the top level Inbox expandable (that section has a
little world icon instead of the little inbox icon). Account1's
inbox lives in a different section from its folders, but it has no
subfolders.
Looking back at Thunderbird, I notice that all the subscribed folders
are now at the same level as the Inbox, just under the account name.
I.e.
Account1 Inbox Trash Folder1 Folder2 ...
I suppose I can live with the Mail.app behavior sans the prefix
setting in the namespace section, but it's not ideal. I'd really
like to know why Mail.app has a problem with this! Why are the
folders there but the contents empty? Is there any way to increase
the logging that Dovecot does to understand what the Mail.app client
is sending and why Dovecot is sending back that error?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
- -Barry
P.S. I wasn't able to use courier2dovecot.sh from the wiki (I think
others had problems with running it on Linux as well, probably due to
the different rename(1) syntax). The courier2dovecot.py file was no
longer available, so I wrote my own. I can make that available to
folks if there's any interest.
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