Greetings,
I've been running Dovecot for a couple years now. Currently 1.0.b8 on FreeBSD i386. I just switched to Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 (windows) for an IMAP client, and am having some problems that appear to be at least partially attributable to Dovecot.
After configuring the IMAP account, TB fetched the list of folders on the server, but was displaying several folders that had been deleted from the server months ago. When I tried to access or delete the folders from TB, it produced an error message (imap command failed, or something similar.) Some other folders had been moved from the root to sub-folders -- they still showed in the root, but not the sub-folder, thus were inaccessible.
I looked all through the client's config files, but couldn't find any reference to them. From a shell on the server, I also verified they did not exist.
I discovered they were still referenced in the .subscribe file, and had index files in .imap on the server. I deleted those, restarted the server processes, and refreshed the folders in TB, and the problem was resolved. But required manual intervention on the server.
Not sure if this is a bug or just client issue, but since those files are maintained by Dovecot, I'm inclined to say "bug". Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about the internals of IMAP!
-Thanks, Wayne