Hey all,

After some kind soul made me understand what I can expect from Dovecot, I feel really embarassed for not being able to set it up correctly.

What I already had was ~/Mail, containing about six maildirs. Exim got mail, delivered it to procmail, and procmail dropped it in my inbox; a needless extra step that I keep for future, ehm, needs that I might start to care about when I can just succesfully use the most basic mail configuration I can think of.

As far as I understood, I just have to point Dovecot to my maildir for it to serve my mail when I connect appropriately with a client. When I test that with KMail connecting to localhost, I get a bizarre overview of my mailfolders, that looks like this:

http://www.xs4all.be/~verbreyt/img/scrots/dovecot-kmail.jpg

The error message on top is what I get when I try to catch up with any possible new mail: "Unable to get information about folder antwort.index. The server replied: Internal error." Syslog says "lstat(/home/tom/Mail/.antwort.index/cur) failed: Not a directory". Could be, of course: the directory should be ~/Mail/antwort/cur. After I ran KMail and got those errors, ~/Mail, previously only containing some folders, each in turn containing cur/, new/ and tmp/, is stuffed with index files, and three new folders (cur/, new/ and tmp/) directly in the toplevel.

$ ls -a Mail . .drafts.index.ids .sent.index.ids .. inbox sent-mail antwort .INBOX .sent-mail.index .antwort.index .inbox.index .sent-mail.index.ids .antwort.index.ids .inbox.index.ids spam check .inbox.index.sorted .spam.index .check.index new .spam.index.ids .check.index.ids outbox tmp cur .outbox.index trash .customflags .outbox.index.ids .trash.index drafts sent .trash.index.ids .drafts.index .sent.index

I'm not sure just where it all goes wrong. Yes, I feel stupid about that, but what did, then, did I misunderstand? The only relevant thing in /etc/dovecot.conf I guess would be "default_mail_env" which I have set to "maildir:~/Mail:INBOX=~/Mail/inbox".

Documentation may be sparse, it'd still make me sad to be the cause of it being extended for use by the clueless. :-/

Grateful for any corrections, Tom

-- "Mongolian drivers do not care much about pedestrians."

np: Predominance - Luftschiffe (flac)