This is tremendously useful, Andreas, thank-you for such a clear
response. I had read the section of the FAQ you cite ('How can I tell
Binc IMAP where my mailboxes/folders are?') but at the time I didn't
really understand what Maildir++ was and the constraints it imposed on
the format of the mailbox. On re-reading it now, and in light of your
comments below, it makes perfect sense. I hadn't read the page on
IMAPdir because I knew I wasn't using it, but I see now that it contains
good info on Maildir++ and that I should have read it.I'll summarize what I've learned in the wiki in the hopes that the next person won't have the same struggle. I've found in my own work that it's always illuminating to see the problems that are encountered by the person who knows absolutely nothing about the area. Thanks again, Mike. -----Original Message----- From: Andreas Aardal Hanssen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: April 16, 2004 2:45 AM To: Binc IMAP General Subject: RE: [binc] Folders shared between Mutt and Thunderbird 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."
