[Dovecot] Maildir hierarchy sep bug ?

[Thomas Hummel]

Hello Timo,

I'm experiencing the following different behaviors with dovecot-1.1.8/Maildir.

My Maildir hierarchy separator is the "." (dot) character.
My namespaces, when I use them,  separator is "/".

When I run the server without any namespaces, I can create mailboxes named something like 

  first.name

which, of course, are shown to the client as

  first/ (non selectionnable)
  first/name

For instance in Mutt, if I save a message (the "s" key) from 

  first.name at some.domain

dovecot happilly creates the

  .first.name/ Maildir

But if I create a public Namespace, then I have to create a private default
namespace as well and the server doesn't behave the same way :

They're set up like this :

namespace private {
   separator = /
   prefix = 
   location = maildir:/courriel/boites/%u:CONTROL=/courriel/meta/%u:INDEX=/var/dovecot/indexes/%1u/%u
   inbox = yes
   hidden = no
   list = yes
   subscriptions = yes
}

namespace public {
  separator = /
  prefix = '#Foo/'
  location = maildir:/courriel/boites/public/foo
  inbox = no
  hidden = yes
  list = no
  subscriptions = no
}

Then users cannot create mailboxes with a dot in it :

  Character not allowed in mailbox name: '.'

which seems normal but can be confusing since, a user used to saving his mail
in first.name (in Mutt for instance) wouldn't be able to do so anymore if the
server goes from the first to the second setting described above.

Granted, a user which does so, probably doesn't do what he thinks he does (he
probably thinks he save his message in a folder named "first.name" while
instead he actually saves it in a subfolder of "first" named "name"). Still it
can be confusing.

Is that difference of behavior normal ? Which is the correct behavior ?

And is there still no way (except to patch the source) to allow dots in mailbox names in Maildir ?

Thanks.

-- 
Thomas Hummel 	    | Institut Pasteur
<hummel at pasteur.fr> | Pôle informatique - systèmes et réseau