Jeff Grossman wrote:

Sahil Tandon wrote:

...

Jakob Grie?mann wrote:

...

I know my question might sound a little bit strange, but is it possible to download IMAP folders via POP3? I have clients who use POP3 on their main machines and IMAP on their "on the road" notebooks. It would be good to download all folders created on the notebook via POP3 to the main desktop.

POP3 should download the newly created folders, unless there are some other idiosyncrasies of which we're not aware. But as a matter of practice, why the mismatch? Better to have users on IMAP from desktop and notebook. Unless this is a mandate "from above" or a legacy issue, move everyone to IMAP!

Are you sure about that? I was always under the impression that POP3
was only able to download the INBOX. You need to use IMAP to see any
other folders that are created on the server.

You are correct of course. Not-so-temporary lapse. :)

-- Sahil Tandon sahil@tandon.net

Jakob Grießmann wrote:

Hi Sahil,

...

POP3 should download the newly created folders, unless there are some other idiosyncrasies of which we're not aware. But as a matter of practice, why the mismatch? Better to have users on IMAP from desktop and notebook. Unless this is a mandate "from above" or a legacy issue, move everyone to IMAP!

well, IMAP needs far more resources on the mail server, so for some users POP3 is desirable. :-)

Is this a real measured problem or a theoretical one?

(Tip: implementing some sort of compression tunnel end to end can really speed up imap header downloads over slower connections (actually I find it speeds up opening larger mailboxes in Thunderbird even over a 5mbit connection...)

Good luck

Ed W

On Dec 25, 2008, at 7:23 PM, Jose Celestino wrote:

Words by Jakob Grießmann [Thu, Dec 25, 2008 at 06:08:35PM +0100]:

...

Hi,

I know my question might sound a little bit strange, but is it possible to download IMAP folders via POP3? I have clients who use POP3 on their main machines and IMAP on their "on the road"
notebooks. It would be good to download all folders created on the notebook via POP3 to the main desktop.

Well, we actualy have that scenario, not for all IMAP folders but for some. We have services that put receipts and unanswered calls and
voice mails on IMAP folders (there's acls and a master password allowing
them to do that) and we had to enable POP access to that for POP only
users.

It's a ugly hack but we have it working.

...

Googling brought up some results, but I don't know how to
implement...

With a ugly hack of course :)

With v1.2 it's less ugly with virtual mailboxes. http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual

But it doesn't sound like such a good idea to actually use. That just
allows the POP3 client to easily download+delete all messages from all
mailboxes..

On Fri, 2008-12-26 at 14:12 +0100, Jakob Grießmann wrote:

Hi Timo,

...

With v1.2 it's less ugly with virtual mailboxes. http://wiki.dovecot.org/Plugins/Virtual

But it doesn't sound like such a good idea to actually use. That just allows the POP3 client to easily download+delete all messages from all mailboxes..

thanks for the pointer, that looks like a nice option! How can I give the POP3 daemon give ~/Maildir/virtual/all (as per example) as main inbox?

namespace private { prefix = virtual/ location = virtual:~/Maildir/virtual inbox = yes } namespace private { prefix = inbox = no }

Then create ~/Maildir/virtual/INBOX/dovecot-virtual file

Can inbox directories be configured separately for POP3 and IMAP?

Yes, but it's kind of kludgy. What userdb are you using? Basically you'd have to make both namespaces have inbox=no and make userdb return namespace_1_inbox=yes or namespace_2_inbox=yes extra field depending on if the user is logging in with pop3 or imap.

Hi Jose,

Well, we actualy have that scenario, not for all IMAP folders but for some. We have services that put receipts and unanswered calls and voice mails on IMAP folders (there's acls and a master password allowing them to do that) and we had to enable POP access to that for POP only users.

It's a ugly hack but we have it working.

;-) how did you achieve that? Patching Dovecot source code?

Jakob