Will everything still work when using IMAPdir instead of maildir++?
Depends on what you mean by work,
Will maildrop still work? Will sqwebmail still work? Both are part of the Courier family, which likes maildir++.
Maildrop works, yes. IMAPdir's are just collections of Maildir's, so maildrop will work as long as it continues to support Maildir. You just have to tell it where the Maildir's are (i.e. instead of just $HOME/Maildir/, new mail must be delivered to $HOME/IMAPdir/INBOX/).
Sqwebmail? I see no reason to think that it wouldn't work, unless it relies on specific Courier features. I haven't tried it myself (I'm a squirrelmail guy), but sqwebmail is just another web-based IMAP client (as far as I know). As long as it doesn't require any of the IMAP-extensions that courier supports (like the CHILDREN extension, for example) then it should be fine.
and on how you "shadow" the maildir directory.
This will be a new box so I won't shadow anything. I agree that wasn't clear in my OP.
Hmm. Well, as long as you can tell everything to use a different inbox than ~/Maildir/ then you're probably fine (and I can't think of a decent piece of software that you might use that wouldn't).
So, the key difference between Maildir++ and IMAPdir is subfolders. In Maildir++, subfolders are Maildirs that are placed in the filesystem hierarchy like so:
Maildir/ <-------------------- inbox Maildir/.Folder/ <------------- subfolder Maildir/.Folder.Subfolder/ <--- subsubfolder
And IMAPdirs also use Maildir's for all the subfolders, but arrange them like this:
IMAPdir/INBOX/ <-------------------- inbox IMAPdir/INBOX.Folder/ <------------- subfolder IMAPdir/INBOX.Folder.Subfolder/ <---- subsubfolder
For simple delivery and reading, it's easy enough to tell everything that has to work with the mail on the filesystem level that the inbox is somewhere new. The trick will be: does any piece of software that you use have to manipulate mail on the filesystem? And of that software, does any of it rely on how the folders are arranged?
In the list of software that you provided earlier, the only one that manipulates the mail at the filesystem level (AFAIK) is maildrop, and I know for a fact that maildrop can easily be configured to deliver to IMAPdir folders trivially. If you were migrating a Maildir system to IMAPdir, then you might possibly have scripts or other bits and bobs of software that rely on folders being arranged a particular way. But since you're starting fresh, I don't think you'll have too much trouble.
Now, I was oversimplifying when I said that the only difference between IMAPdir and Maildir is the folder layout. The other difference that I know about (and I'm pretty sure that's it) is how quota information is stored. In the realm of quota information, however, only two pieces of software need to know the details of how it works: the thing that delivers mail, and the thing that deletes mail. Since you're using Binc, it obviously knows how quotas work in IMAPdir, and anything that reads mail through Binc will too. For delivery... I don't know. I'd be surprised if maildrop understood Maildir++ quotas, much less IMAPdir quotas, and qmail certainly doesn't understand either one. But that's for someone more knowledgeable than me to help you with.
~Kyle
--
When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
-- Thomas Jefferson
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