folders not visible on copied mail folders

[Steffen Kaiser]

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On Mon, 16 Jul 2018, Mark Foley wrote:

> We had a user quit recently.  Three days ago I copied his entire Maildir folder to another user
> to that user's Maildir/.JoesEmail.  I changed ownership and made the permission 'chmod -R
> og-rwx .', just like all the other files/directories of the new owner.  This didn't work to show
> the new folder.  Today, in his Thunderbird client, I subscribed to the 'JoesEmail' folder.  I
> restarted dovecot and restarted Thunderbird.
>
> In Thunderbird, the 'JoesEmail' folder now shows, but it is empty and shows none of the
> subordinate mail folders.  I ran 'doveadm index -u newowner JoesEmail' and
> 'doveadm force-resync -u newowner JoesEmail'.  This didn't help.
>
> I did this once before with a previous user who quit and only changed ownership, no
> subscribing, no doveadm, and that worked.
>
> What am I doing wrong?

Your description might be interpreted one way or another, esp. "copied his 
entire Maildir folder ... to that user's Maildir/.JoesEmail".

Also, it depends on how you have configured mail_location.

If this means that you have:
Maildir/.JoesEmail/{new,cur,tmp} 
Maildir/.JoesEmail/.mailbox/{new,cur,tmp} 
Maildir/.JoesEmail/.mailbox.submailbox/{new,cur,tmp}
now, that will clash with the standard Maildir format: 
https://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir

You would need to move the subfolders with a leading dot of .JoesEmail 
into:
Maildir/.JoesEmail/{new,cur,tmp} 
Maildir/.JoesEmail.mailbox/{new,cur,tmp} 
Maildir/.JoesEmail.mailbox.submailbox/{new,cur,tmp}

If you use :LAYOUT=fs to mail_location, .JoesEmail should spell JoesEmail

Subscription is needed only, if the mail client "displays subscribed 
folders only" or does not "display all folders". The meaning of the 
setting varies from client to client.

Another way would to keep the other account and share it via ACLs: 
https://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Shared


- -- 
Steffen Kaiser
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