ed beers wrote:

I'm trying to migrate my emails from an existing server (University of Washington IMAP toolkit) to dovecot. My clients are all using Thunderbird.

I'm moving to a new Ubuntu based server (old one was Centos4) and selected dovecot solely because it was the default option. I'm not committed to it if it isn't the right tool for my application.

I very much doubt Dovecot is not the right tool for the job, if IMAP is what you're after :)

My existing server allows hierarchical folders and these are used to organize 20 years worth of carefully sorted emails. I can create a new folders on the dovecot server but Thunderbird doesn't allow me to create new sub-folders within them. I think T-bird is configured OK since this works on the old server.

Is this a dovecot limitation or have I configured it incorrectly?

This is a mail store limitation, somewhat.

If you've opted for mbox, things can be tricky. I've found for one server I use I have to create folders with a trailing / in order to be able to create sub-folders in them. However, they then can not contain messages as well.

Maildir does not suffer this limitation, as it doesn't use a hierarchy of filesystem directories to denote mail folders. Each folder is its own directory.

-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net