[Dovecot] Cannot read mdir inbox.

[Marc Dufour]

Problem:

Dovecot is totally and merrily oblivious to maildir INBOX installed in 
the usual /var/spool/mail/%u

Software/system:

Dovecot 1.2.8

running under Fedora 12 with 1.9 gig RAM + AMD Athlon LE-1640 CPU on a 
ASUS M3A78-EM motherboard
(uname -a =
Linux 2.6.31.6-162.fc12.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Dec 4 00:06:26 EST 2009 x86_64 
x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux )

Dovecot has been installed from the Fedora repositories, not recompiled 
from scratch. System has only one hard disk and is on one ext4 LVM 
partition.

My configurations are

http://emdx.org/Dovecot/dovecot.confA.txt for "dovecot -a"
http://emdx.org/Dovecot/dovecot.confN.txt for "dovecot -n"

The mail is properly delivered by Exim in the proper place.

Using a client (Thunderbird 3), if I copy some messages in the INBOX, 
they stay there, but they are nowhere to be found in the 
/var/spool/mail/%u directory.

User mail is in ~/Maildir.

I tried to make a symlink pointing to /var/spool/mail/%u and, of course, 
it does not work.

I also tried giving chmod 666 to all files in /var/spool/mail/%u (and 
chmod 777 for the directories), this makes no difference.

Otherwise, Dovecot works flawlessly and without no problems whatsoever 
in ~/Maildir. I can transfer huge volumes of email from the future old 
server and everything is rock solid. I just can’t get the INBOX.

I would rather not fiddle with Exim and have it deliver the mail into 
~/Maildir

Google has been stellarly inefficient in helping me find solutions.