[Dovecot] recursive mail_location?

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Forgive what may be a newby question, but I'm trying to get a new setup
working, and there are many different things confusing me.

I'm trying for a gnus + dovecot + mbsync arrangement, with mbsync
writing to maildirs, and gnus reading from those dirs with a dovecot
invocation. Fairly standard, I think.

I have multiple email accounts I'm trying to sync, all of them gmail. My
problem is that mbsync creates one maildir structure for each mailbox in
each account. So I end up with:

~/mail
├── acc1
│   ├── INBOX
│   │   ├── cur
│   │   ├── new
│   │   └── tmp
│   └── OTHERBOX
│       ├── cur
│       ├── new
│       └── tmp
└── acc2
    ├── INBOX
    │   ├── cur
    │   ├── new
    │   └── tmp
    └── OTHERBOX
        ├── cur
        ├── new
        └── tmp

And so on, for many accounts, and many mailboxes.

I believe there's something I can configure in mbsync to collapse this a
little, but there's still going to be quite a bit of nesting. Gnus,
meanwhile, is meant to invoke dovecot with the "-o mail_location"
switch, and as far as I can tell that needs to be pointed at a maildir
structure, which means I would need a separate gnus server for each
mailbox in each account.

Does anyone have a recommended way of handling this? Is it possible to
either "flatten" the structure further, or somehow tell dovecot to
recurse into directories? I don't mind having a separate gnus server for
each mail account, but I'd hate to have to do one per mailbox.

I'm only just getting started and haven't invested myself in any
particular setup, so if the answer is "you're doing it all wrong", I
would love to hear that.

Thanks!
Eric