On 8 Jul 2009, at 18:08, Timo Sirainen wrote:

On Wed, 2009-07-08 at 17:58 +0100, Jim Reid wrote:

...

Hi. I've been fighting a losing battle to get Apple Mail and dovecot to play nice. When dovecot is told to use mbox-style mailboxes, it's not possible to create child mailboxes. Apple Mail whines "The IMAP command “CREATE” failed with server error: Mailbox doesn't allow inferior mailboxes.". I've looked through the documentation, the wiki and searched the mail archives without finding a solution. Can anyone help?

If you want to create e.g. "sub/box", start from nothing. Don't create "sub". Give the mailbox name as "sub/box". The "sub" then can't have messages, but it can have other child mailboxes.

Thanks for the quick response Timo. Sadly, your suggestion doesn't
look as if it'll work because there are many non-empty parent
mailboxes that have to get shifted to the new dovecot server. ie There
are messages in sub as well as sub/box: too many to move to sub/ whatever. And there are many of these sorts of folders too. Some
mailboxes are even more deeply nested with subfolders: sub/box1/box2
where sub/box1 holds messages. Looks like an all-mbox solution isn't
going to be viable at all. Oh well.

...

I've tried (and failed) to get a hybrid maildir/mbox setup to work like that shown on http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces. When that gets plugged into dovecot.conf, Apple Mail blocks, with the Activity
window saying "waiting for login" or something like that, even though a
valid imaps connection and login has been established.

I don't really know about that. What kind of a namespace configuration exactly did you use?

Here's the last one I tried before hitting a dead end. There were
various combinations of settings for the prefix, hidden and list
variables that were tried unsuccessfully before that.

###namespace private { ### separator = / ### #prefix = "#mbox/" ### location = mbox:INBOX=/var/mail/%u ### inbox = yes ### #hidden = yes ### list = no # for v1.1+ ###} ###namespace private { ### separator = / ### prefix = ### location = maildir:/mail/imap/$u:LAYOUT=fs ### inbox = no ### list = yes ###}

Hi Timo. Thanks again for your help. I've got things just about
working as planned. There's one minor irritation however. Users see a
strange mailbox icon at the top of their list of mailboxes on the
dovecot server. It's called #mbox and has a > symbol next to it
indicating that it contains nested mailbox(es). The icon for the
mailbox not filled in, which is usually how Apple Mail indicates
there's something wrong with the mailbox. In this case, it's not
possible to put messages in #mbox. Is there a simple way to make this
mailbox disappear from the list displayed by the client?

# 1.1.16: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf # OS: FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE amd64 base_dir: /var/run/dovecot/ syslog_facility: local4 protocols: imaps listen: *, [::] ssl_cert_file: /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem ssl_key_file: /usr/local/etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem ssl_cipher_list: ALL:!LOW:!SSLv2 login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_max_processes_count: 8 login_max_connections: 32 max_mail_processes: 32 mail_privileged_group: mail mail_debug: yes mbox_write_locks: fcntl namespace: type: private separator: / prefix: #mbox/ location: mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u inbox: yes hidden: yes list: yes subscriptions: yes namespace: type: private separator: / location: maildir:/mail/imap/%u:LAYOUT=fs list: yes subscriptions: yes auth default: mechanisms: cram-md5 verbose: yes debug: yes passdb: driver: pam passdb: driver: passwd-file args: /usr/local/etc/dovecot-md5 userdb: driver: passwd

On 13 Jul 2009, at 13:10, Axel Luttgens wrote:

Could you try with " list = no" for your first namespace definition?

Doh! This does the job!! Thanks very much Axel. I'm drinking too much
coffee if I miss something that obvious.... :-)