Mailbox configuration questions

[Joseph Tam]

On Sat, 6 Mar 2021, justina colmena ~biz wrote:

> I am having subtle problems with IMAP mailbox configuration on certain clients
> such as KMail and Thunderbird, whereas the previous setup was working on
> K9Mail (mobile) and Trojit? (desktop).
>
> I was using Maildir folders, which were mostly working before, but for some
> reason I had to create explicitly named namespaces for the flatfile (mbox)
> Inbox and the Maildir "Home" folders. I also specified an INDEX directory for
> the inboxes, which I made world-writable and sticky, because of permission
> problems creating subdirectories in it.

Ordinarily, mail readers using a remote mail protocol are not
concerned with the underlying storage; IMAP servers deal with those
details and provide abstractions to the client such as namespaces,
mailboxes, messages, etc., although it does manifest itself in some
ways (e.g. Maildir allows maiboxes to contain both messages and other
mailboxes).

The abtstractions provided by POP and IMAP are quite different, though.

I can't quite tell from your statement whether you're using the same
server (and configurations) for both sets of clients.  A dovecot
configurations dump would be useful.

> KMail always seems to put sent mail into a local "sent-mail" folder, rather
> than the IMAP Sent folder associated with the sending account. (KMail and
> Thunderbird have a more POP-oriented architecture for the desktop, whereas
> Trojit? is exclusively IMAP.)

(What do you mean by "POP-oriented"?  One mailbox (INBOX)?  Store and
forward operation?  I wouldn't agree with either of these 2 assertions.)

Outgoing mailbox name is a mail reader setting.  Some default to
"sent-mail", some to "Sent", some to others.  There are various ways
you can try unifying them to a single mailbox in IMAP:

 	- mailbox aliasing: various ways such as filesystem symlink, or
 	dovecot aliasing (https://wiki2.dovecot.org/Plugins/MailboxAlias).

 	- IMAP SPECIAL-USE (RFC6514) which hints to the mail reader
 	which mailbox to use for a specific purpose.  Not all readers
 	implement this.

 	- publish a standard configuration for your users: this
 	delegates control to your users, rather than enforcing it
 	using the server.

> Is there an easier better way to organize some of this stuff? Or how is it
> "usually" done?

I'm not sure what you mean by "organizing": making users' mail more
consistent across different mail readers, despite their differences?
Most are taken care of by using IMAP, and there are special niche settings
for the mail reader features you're trying to address.

Joseph Tam <jtam.home at gmail.com>