On Sun, 2007-09-16 at 13:03 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Dovecot has both mbox and Maildir format support.
I find the statement that dovecot has maildir format support misleading.
By maildir support, I mean that mail is contained in directories ~/Maildir/inbox/[cur,new,tmp], ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp], ~/Maildir/Finance/[cur,new,tmp], etc.
That's one way to implement multiple mailboxes to Maildir format, but there's no such standard.
As far as I can see, if you now set up an IMAP server using dovecot on this machine, setting mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir/ in /etc/dovecot.conf then the email in the folders Family, Finance, etc will not be seen by an IMAP client.
With v1.1 you can do this with:
mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir:LAYOUT=fs
To clarify my question, suppose one has email organised in server X as described above, in directories ~/Maildir/Family/[cur.new.tmp/ , etc. And now suppose one wants to access this email from laptop Y. How exactly does one have to change the setup on machine X? And what does one set mail_location to?
Why do you want it to work like that? Can't you just use the Maildir++ layout and use the email only via IMAP?
It seems to me that this is an issue likely to be faced by anyone wanting to run a small home network. reading email on various machines, and wanting this email to be kept "in sync".
If you use only IMAP, there should be no problem.