[Dovecot] What is your dovecot setup?

[Bill Cole]

At 1:55 PM +0100 9/17/07, Timothy Murphy  imposed structure on a 
stream of electrons, yielding:
>On Mon 17 Sep 2007, Bill Cole wrote:
>
>>  At 2:45 AM +0100 9/17/07, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>>  >I'd be really grateful if someone running a dovecot IMAP (or IMAPS) server
>>  >could tell me exactly how their email folders are arranged.
>>
>>  Beware. You are asking to have other people tell you who you are.
>>  That usually does not work well.
>
>Non capisco.

Dovecot is highly configurable for a reason: mail systems can be 
widely variable in design and complexity. Different sites have 
different needs, different admins have different whims.

To some extent, how you set up a mail system is an expression of your 
needs, your users' needs, and your personality.

>>  ~/Maildir/new is where Postfix delivers new messages. ~Maildir/cur is
>>  where dovecot moves messages that it has seen. My mail clients do all
>>  the work for moving some messages to subdirectories in the maildir
>>  tree.
>
>Where exactly do they move email to?

They tell Dovecot to move them to other logical mailboxes. Those are 
implemented as additional Maildir-format directories inside ~/Maildir.

>>  http://wiki.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir describes the way
>>  dovecot implements the Maildir++ quasi-standard.
>
>I don't think so.
>I just looked again at this document,
>but I'm afraid I find it more or less useless.

That's a terrible shame. You probably don't need to understand 
everything on that page, but it and the linked pages describing the 
Maildir structure answer everything you've asked.

>A concrete example of an actual mail setup
>and how this is seen by an IMAP client
>would have been much more useful, in my view.

Aside from creating the top-level Maildir directory and telling 
whatever your delivery agent is where to find it (and perhaps telling 
Dovecot, if it is a strange place...), you don't need to set any of 
the Maildir structure up or go digging into it on the filesystem 
level. Dovecot presents an Inbox to IMAP clients, and IMAP clients 
can tell Dovecot to create whatever logical directory structures the 
user wants.

Of course, if you use a storage format other than Maildir then the 
answers are all different.



-- 
Bill Cole
bill at scconsult.com