Hi, Mike.
On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, Mike Iles wrote:
>My directory structure is like this:
>~/Maildir/[cur|new|tmp]
>~/Maildir/Folder1/[cur|new|tmp]
>~/Maildir/Folder2/[cur|new|tmp]
>Mutt accesses these directly through the filesystem, not through Binc (I
>should have made that clear in my original post).
>When you say that Binc requires dots for folder separators, I take that
>to mean that my .bincimap-subscribed file should contain entries like
>'INBOX.Folder1', 'INBOX.Folder2', etc. If so, then I guess I don't
No, the subscribed file shows what IMAP folders are substribed to:
INBOX/Folder1, INBOX/Folder2.
>understand what 'INBOX' refers to. Should 'Folder1' be a peer of
>'~/Maildir', or a subdirectory of it?
Every user has a mail depository where all mail resides. In Binc IMAP, we
defined the mail depository as your collection of mail folders /
mailboxes. With qmail, you typically have only one mailbox called
~/Maildir, which is accessed only via POP3 or a local accessor.
Courier-IMAP extended this to allow mailboxes _inside_ this directory with
a convention called Maildir++. Maildir is by default interpreted by IMAP
as the special mailbox INBOX, while Courier-IMAP allowed nesting such as
INBOX/folder1, INBOX/folder2, INBOX/folder1/subfolder1 and so on. The
mentioned structure would be represented in the file system the following
way:
~/Maildir/.folder1/{cur,new,tmp}
~/Maildir/.folder1.subfolder1/{cur,new,tmp}
~/Maildir/.folder2/{cur,new,tmp}
Mutt in native mode doesn't know about Maildir++, or IMAP or anything. It
just reads the mailboxes it finds in the file system, so it would expect
this structure:
~/Maildir/folder1/{cur,new,tmp}
~/Maildir/folder1/subfolder1/{cur,new,tmp}
~/Maildir/folder2/{cur,new,tmp}
Binc doesn't support a regular nested mailbox structure like mutt does.
The reason for this is that mutt doesn't care about IMAP and its mailbox
structuring conventions, but Binc IMAP must adhere to these. The regular
unix mailbox structure doesn't work with IMAP, because with two mailboxes
A and A/B in IMAP, you can delete A without deleting A/B. There are also
other problems that need to be addressed by an IMAP server. This is why
Binc IMAP also uses the dots as hierarchy delimiters instead of the unix
'/'.
Binc IMAP also respects Maildir, which doesn't describe maildirs inside
maildirs; maildirs are described as leaves in the file system, just as
regular mbox files would be. Treating them this way is the only way to
ensure modularity so that any mailbox type can be stored in the same
structure.
Note that the directory name of your mailbox depot can be anything; pine
uses "mail", KMail uses "Mail", netscaped used "ns-imap" or "ns-mail" or
something. Courier-IMAP uses "Maildir" just like qmail likes to. Look up
bincimap.conf under the Mailbox section, and see the option called "depot
path". In Binc IMAP, you can set the depot path in your config file to
whatever you like, and the default is "Maildir" because most Bincers
migrate from qmail/Courier-IMAP or just qmail-pop3d, and this makes
converting very convenient.
>PS - And yes, I've read through pretty much the whole wiki and searched
>the mail archives, but I haven't found any information that makes this
>clear to me. I'd be happy to add my notes to the wiki once I've got this
>sorted out.
Did you read the FAQ? It has a mention of this,
http://www.bincimap.org/bincimap-faq.html#q12
and this also gives more info:
http://www.bincimap.org/bincimap-imapdir.html
Andy
--
Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg
Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something
http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
