Changing IMAP separator - does it break things?

[Victor Sudakov]

Filip Hajný wrote:
> 14. 10. 2020 v 11:51, Victor Sudakov <vas at sibptus.ru>:
> > 
> >> I had to do it with 10-20 live users and it went fine, nobody noticed
> >> anything (I made the change in the night hours just to be sure
> >> though). I had to go down and fix some erratic folder names that
> >> resulted from the botched separator handling on some macOS Mail
> >> accounts.
> > 
> > Did it change anything on Dovecot disk/storage or is the IMAP separator just
> > "virtual" - ephemeral ?
> 
> Changing the separator won't fix anything that already exists. You should see nonsense folders in the form of  '.folder\2esubfolder‘ there that cannot be worked with in any way. I manually moved the contents of these to their properly named ('.folder.subfolder‘) variants - on disk.
> 

I was asking because the section "Hierarchy separators" in
https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/namespace/ somewhat implies
that 

However, changing the separator doesn’t change the on-disk “layout separator”.

That's why I thought that the separator is in fact virtual.

At present, if my folder layout in the mail client is

Inbox
  |
  +---Friends
         |
         +----Paul
         |
         +----Jessica

the folder "Jessica" on-disk is something like ~/Maildir/.Friends.Jessica/{cur,new,tmp}/

Do you mean to say that if I change the IMAP separator to "/", Dovecot
will not translate "/" into "." and the folder "Jessica" will become
inaccessible?



-- 
Victor Sudakov,  VAS4-RIPE, VAS47-RIPN
2:5005/49 at fidonet http://vas.tomsk.ru/
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