On 3/14/2012 7:33 PM, Joseph Tam wrote:

Steve Campbell <campbell@cnpapers.com> writes:

...

Their imap folders, the ones that they create using an imap client or webmail, are either in ~ or ~/mail. Their original .mailboxlist is always in ~. Based on that, I should probably copy any imap folders not in ~/mail to that folder, duplicate ~/.mailboxlist to the file ~/mail/.subscriptions, and amend any .subscriptions file contents to just have the name of the folders (without any "mail/folder" reference in it).

My example would then be as follows

/home/steve = folder /home/steve/Drafts = original folder /home/steve/AnyFolder = original folder /home/steve/.mailboxlist = original file /home/steve/mail = folder (either original or created) /home/steve/mail/.subscriptions = copied contents of .mailboxlist file /home/steve/mail/Drafts = copied folder of original /home/steve/mail/AnyFolder = copied folder of original

Contents of original .mailboxlist and new .subscriptions:

Drafts AnyFolder

If the imap folders were in ~/mail, then the original .mailboxlist would have been

mail/Drafts mail/AnyFolder

but after the corrections to the .subscriptions file, they would be as above (without reference to the mail folder).

Is this correct?

That depends -- are you aliasing namespaces so that prefix={"", "mail/", etc.} all map to a user's ~/mail folder? You may be creating a confusing situation where a client with a null IMAP prefix has 2 copies of a mailbox.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home@gmail.com> I have the following set:

mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u

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

These are mostly what's defined as the "Backward Compatability" namespaces in the wiki.

Are you saying that I should probably have something like the following then:

namespace { type = private separator = / prefix = location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u inbox = yes hidden = yes list = no }

And is the multiple "inbox = yes" in the differing namespaces a no-no? Based on the comments in the 10-mail.conf file, it seems to say it is a problem, but if a user has any prefix defined, even the blank prefix, wouldn't that mean they use only that set of parameters defined in the namespace being used?

So far, I've only changed one prefix in the building to the #mbox prefix and that was because of the weird layout of files they had.

I'm hoping one day to understand all of this. Dovecot, as I stated before, is much more complex that the imap server used previously. It allows one to use all of the facilities of the imap protocol, and much more, but unfortunately, for admins like me that are just moving to these new imap servers, most of those extras were either unknown to me or unused.

Again, thanks all for the patience and help.

steve