[Dovecot] No folders listed in felamimail

Jonathan Knight j.knight at kis.keele.ac.uk
Wed Jul 1 11:25:57 EEST 2009


dovecot-request at dovecot.org wrote:
> I thought I try and solve a long standing bug we've had with felamimail
> not listing folders from our dovecot server.
>   


Is it bad form to reply to your own postings?

I've managed to find the source of the problem and apply a temporary
hack to get the folders listed.  I'm not sure whether it's a bug or a
feature or if there is a proper fix.

The issue is that our mail folder layout is still based on "elm" (hands
up everyone who remembers that) and we store all the users folders in
mbox format under a directory called Mail in their home directory.

We've defined a namespace in dovecot called "" which knows to look there
and will list all the folders.  However, we have run uw-imap in the past
so we have a hidden namespace that maps all the folders starting "Mail/"
to the new namespace so that we didn't have to change any of the clients.

Egroupware has a bunch of code that tries to guess what sort of IMAP
server is on the other end based on what folders it can find.  One of
those checks is for "Mail" and when it finds it it assumes that's the
place to go looking for folders rather than using what the Namespace
command returned.  I'm guessing that this was put in by someone with the
same layout as we used to have with "elm" trying to overcome the lack of
a configuration file in uw-imap.  Our "Mail/" namespace doesn't list any
folders and so felamimail can't see anything for the user.

My temporary hack was to comment out all the IMAP server guessing code
and that fixes the problem for us.

Now I need to find out how felamimail deals with IMAP servers that can't
have mail folders containing messages and subfolders (it's one or the
other with dovecot using mbox)

Jon.


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