[Dovecot] dot named folders

[Micah Anderson]

Willie Gillespie <wgillespie+dovecot at es2eng.com> writes:

> On 03/07/2012 12:43 PM, Micah Anderson wrote:
>>
>> When a user makes a folder called 'x.y' it actually creates a folder
>> called 'x' with a folder called 'y' inside, rather than a folder called
>> 'x.y'. I'm guessing this has to do with an internal folder separator
>> namespace configuration, but I'm a bit confused by how this works.
>
> Correct.
> Similar to how in Linux, I could create a folder
> mkdir test1/test2
> It will create test2 inside of test1.
>
> The difference being that IMAP doesn't necessarily need the parent mailbox to
> exist, where Linux would throw an error if test1/ didn't exist first.
>
> So basically, as far as I know, you can't have a folder with a "." in the name
> with the namespaces you have set up.

That makes sense, however I'm not sure that I need these namespaces any
longer if I no longer am using the maildir format (mdbox). 

In either case, it seems like the internal folder separator should not
be exposed to the user like this. What is happening now is the user gets
something other than they expect (a folder within a folder, instead of a
folder with a dot in the name) because of some unknown internal
configuration. 

If moving to mdbox is not enough to remove these namespace
configurations that cause this, then it would be good if the user was
unable to create such a folder, because it was prohibited, rather than
creating something other than they expect.

micah