At 2:10 AM +0100 9/18/07, Timothy Murphy imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
On Tue 18 Sep 2007, Bill Cole wrote:
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.
Surely it would take far less time to give your actual setup than it would to explain (at length) how easy it is to set it up ...
The two dozen subfolders of my IMAP account are really not going to be helpful for you to know, and frankly, are none of your business.
Here is my server directory setup: ~/Maildir/[cur,new,tmp], ~/Maildir/.Family/[cur,new,tmp], etc.
My dovecot.conf sets mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir/
That should not be necessary, since it is where Dovecot looks first, but it should be harmless.
My .procmailrc sets MAILDIR=/var/spool/mail DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
It's been a long time since I used procmail, but that looks wrong. See http://wiki.dovecot.org/procmail for details.
I cannot see the Family folder from my IMAPS client. Also it complains of the lack of .INBOX.directory ("Could Not Determine Resource Status").
A concrete problem description, at last.
Is .Family a proper Maildir++ directory? i.e. does it have a maildirfolder file in it? Missing that would cause Dovecot to not use it.
If your mail client (KMail?) provides a way to set the IMAP path prefix and it is set to INBOX, remove that. It looks like your client wants that prefix, which hints at you maybe having used Courier in the past... See http://wiki.dovecot.org/MissingMailboxes
-- Bill Cole bill@scconsult.com