[dovecot] maildirmake, shared folders

Amelia A.Lewis amyzing at talsever.com
Fri Jan 3 04:07:03 EET 2003


Does dovecot support shared folders, maildir style?

I've set it up, using the maildirmake from debian maildrop to create folders.  I have a number of as-yet unresolved issues, so I haven't been able to test with many clients.  It's interesting that dovecot manages to present folders as siblings (rather than children) of INBOX.  But mutt, at least, doesn't seem to see the shared maildir (created per instructions in the maildirmake man page).

I find in the debian archives that courier is unable to see messages delivered to new in a shared maildir.  This doesn't seem to be the same set of symptoms, though.  It appears, instead, that dovecot isn't recognizing (and then advertising) the shared-maildirs file (a text file that describes the name and the location).  Is that the case?  I don't think it's a high priority, mind, just wondering.

Another question: can the dovecot distribution include a maildirmake utility?  The documentation is pretty blunt about the significant advantages of maildirs, but one has to go to the courier distribution to find a utility to pre-create these (which dovecot seems to want, since it's recognizing the mail type by looking for the dir).  This is most significant when setting up new users, of course.  Possibly this is inappropriate, and I should instead ask the debian package maintainer to 'recommend' or 'suggest' the maildrop package in order to get the required utility.

Nice stuff, though.  I really like the ease of administration; dovecot looks to me like a sort of equivalent to postfix, for IMAP instead of SMTP.  A request for the website: perhaps developers could supply information on clients used with the server, and what oddities are encountered?  I know that IMAP client support is spotty, at best (for instance, I can't find a client that can do digest-md5; mutt is supposedly capable, but my installation doesn't even admit that that's a valid authenticator).  This is partly significant because setting up a system that uses options for which there is little or no client support is, perhaps, an exercise in futility.

Amy!
-- 
Amelia A. Lewis                    amyzing {at} talsever.com
Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to
others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what
you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.
                -- The Duchess [Lewis Carroll]



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