[Dovecot] Pros and cons of having folders under INBOX vs. not

[Stan Hoeppner]

On 4/18/2013 1:51 AM, Rich Wales wrote:
> I have some questions about whether I should set up folders under
> INBOX vs. having them outside the INBOX namespace.
> 
> I'm setting up a new Dovecot 2.2.0 on an Ubuntu 12.04.2 server.
> 
> My plan is to move my users (family members) to this new server from
> an old Cyrus server.
> 
> Everybody is currently using (and will continue to use) IMAP, and
> either Thunderbird or SquirrelMail as their e-mail client.
> 
> I'm using the maildir mailbox format on this new Dovecot server.
> 
> No one is using the new Dovecot server yet, so I'm still free to do
> additional tweaking of the server configuration.
> 
> When I used imapsync to copy everyone's mail to the new server, I
> found that all the folders (other than INBOX) were renamed.  On the
> old Cyrus server, all the folders are subfolders of INBOX, but the
> folders on the new Dovecot server are not.  (For example, a folder
> named "INBOX.Dovecot" on the old server was renamed to "Dovecot" on
> the new server by the imapsync utility.)
> 
> Can I just keep things this way on the new server?  Or are my users
> going to run into problems if folders are not all under INBOX?  I
> do realize that IMAP servers can be set up either to put everything
> under INBOX, or not, but I'm not familiar with all the pros/cons.

It's a new server which requires a new MUA configuration, folder
subscriptions, etc.  Any mail sorting or other folder based MUA rules
will have to be rewritten regardless.  So the namespace hierarchy
shouldn't really matter from a technical standpoint.

What matters is if your family members are able and, more importantly,
willing, to adapt to a new namespace layout.

> And if I do need (or want) to put all the folders under INBOX, can
> I simply rename the existing folders in each user's Maildir (and
> also edit folder names accordingly in everyone's "subscriptions"
> file)?  Or will Dovecot be broken unless I recopy everything from
> scratch (with a command-line option to imapsync to put everything
> in the INBOX destination namespace)?

I don't think your directory renaming method will work, at least not in
isolation.  I think you'll still need to tweak your Dovecot namespace
config.

-- 
Stan