On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Tomas Krag wrote: >OK, but my problem has been 2-fold. When I got the folder-structure >right (as in the above example) there is a problem with offlineimap and >the way it handles messages in the /new folders, i.e. I can't see new >mails unless I copy them to the /cur folder. At the moment I am not >feeling adventurous enough to start running scripts to solve this issue, >or to try and patch offlineimap.
Hi, Tomas! You should be aware that the problem _is_ caused by a bug in offlineimap, so it's not all bad to apply the patch that Daniel suggested. Or to email the offlineimap maintainers and get them to fix it. The bug is that offlineimap stores file names in new/ with characters that are disallowed by the standard. The only alternative is to run a script which fixes the names that offlineimap creates. >So I returned to my original folder structure, which is not . separated >but slash separated as in: > ~/Maildir/INBOX/cur > ~/Maildir/INBOX/new > ~/Maildir/INBOX/tmp > ~/Maildir/INBOX/Sent/cur > ~/Maildir/INBOX/Sent/new > ~/Maildir/INBOX/Sent/tmp >Which bincimap can't handle. I have been told, by someone who is much >more knowledgeable than me, that the above folder structure is supported >by the original UW-IMAP server, but no other server. This is true, but UW-IMAP doesn't support nested mailboxes, only nested UNIX paths. Or to make it clear: UW-IMAP has no special folder structure. When you log in as john, it lists all files in ~john. Then you need to navigate to the folder that contains mailbox-files. Typically you would search for mailboxes in the "Mail/" or "mail/" directory. UW-IMAP does not support structures such as INBOX/Work or Groups/BincIMAP/News, if INBOX is a mailbox and Groups is a mailbox and BincIMAP is a mailbox. INBOX is hardcoded to /var/spool/mail/john or something like that. This approach is considered unsafe for several obvious reasons. :-) And this is the approach that Evolution also uses - because it's a local client and not a server-side client. Binc IMAP, on the other hand, operates only inside a single mail depot, and if you set the chroot path, user and group, it also considers the depot as its jail. It enters the jail, locks the key, and can no longer access anything outside the jail. Inside this depot, it defines a method in which mailboxes can exist at both the root level and as children of other mailboxes, and mailboxes can contain both emails and other mailboxes. It does that in a way that is compliant with IMAP. The method, structure, convention, is called IMAPdir. If Evolution supports IMAPdir, then there will be no problem. :-) >I'll try and update the wiki-page to make it as clear as possible what it >is I mean. Okay; I believe that the thing that would save your day would be to fix the bug in offlineimap, and have Evolution support IMAPdir. Because the IMAP protocol defines folders differently from UNIX, there's no trivial way to have Binc IMAP support the UNIX folder structure for mailboxes. Sadly! :-) 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."
