[Dovecot] Mail disappearing

[Steve Kurzeja]

The "dot" notation for folder hierarchy doesn't matter. Its the 
implementation of the imap server itself as to how it handles the folder 
hierarchy.

When I migrated from uw-imap to courier, I patched courier so that it would 
show all folders at the root level rather than under INBOX, so that 
end-users wouldnt notice a thing during migration.
There was a patch floating around on the net but its out-dated now. 
Involves doing your own patches now.

The hard-line stance of courier that all IMAP clients should support the 
IMAP NAMESPACE  feature is not practical. So this is a big draw card to 
dovecot for me.
Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Green" <chris at areti.co.uk>
To: <dovecot at dovecot.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2005 8:04 PM
Subject: Re: [Dovecot] Mail disappearing


> On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 10:46:57PM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
>> Please don't scare the wotsits out of me, I've just abandoned Courier
>> IMAP for two reasons:
>>
>> 1) it seems incapable of handling subfolders anywhere but below the
>> Inbox and the only help suggested is that I should ask the people
>> writing my mail client to fix it - so that covers Microsoft (x2),
>> Mozilla (x2), Eudora, Evolution and Squirrel mail for starters!
>>
> Of course it can't because it uses the brain-dead convention of
> folders all being files at the same level with '.' separators in the
> filenames indicating folders.
>
> Thus a folder called 'holidays' is actually a directory called
> 'INBOX.holidays' and a folder called 'holidays/france' is a directory
> called 'INBOX.holidays.france'.  Why any sort of mail server would
> want to construct a folder hierarchy like this I can never understand.
> It's not just Courier either, there are a few maildir based servers
> which do it.
>
> (I'm not absolutely sure that the directories have the INBOX stuck on
> the front but however it's done they have to be all rooted in the same
> place because of the stupid idea of using '.' in the name rather than
> a really separate directory)
>
> -- 
> Chris Green (chris at areti.co.uk)
>
>    "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
>