On 25 Jul 2006, at 3:03 AM, Ronny Adsetts wrote:

Hi All,

I recently switched our Courier IMAP server over to Dovecot
primarily for performance reasons. Server OS is Debian Sarge with Dovecot
packages from backports.org (v 1.0.rc2-1bpo1).

Access from Thunderbird and Horde worked fine with some shared folders defined and the Courier compatibility private folder stanza. Initial testing with Mail.app showed that, although the folder listing was
fetched correctly including all shared folders, no mail could be viewed with Mail.app timing out with an error about invalid namespace. (I'll
post the exact error message as a follow up when I can test again later).

After searching the mailing list for a while, I came upon a message suggesting adding a second private namespace like so:

namespace private { separator = . prefix = "INBOX." inbox = yes hidden = no }

namespace private { separator = . prefix = inbox = yes hidden = yes }

Now, this does work in a fashion and allows Mail.app to access the folders and mail. Problem with this config:

• Mail.app displays all INBOX. folders at the top level *and* below
  Inbox
• Thunderbird displays a spurious INBOX folder in the folder
  listing under Inbox.
• Horde displays folders at the top level and below Inbox.

Whilst not being a huge problem for our internal mail server, this
is not optimal.

Has anyone else had these or similar problems and managed to work them out? If so, how did you configure Dovecot or the clients to all play nicely together?

I'd quite like to roll Dovecot out on our client mail server but I
need to work this out first so any help is appreciated.

I use Dovecot with Mail.app. In fact, I got your email that way. I
moved all my mail from the old server I was using to Dovecot with
Thunderbird. I didn't do anything special. It just worked. If you
want to contact me off-list and see what my config file looks like or
something, I'm willing to lend a hand.

Jon