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.

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$ 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

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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)