There is one BIG and confusing glitch with installing Courier IMAP
server: it's the creation of Maildirs. If one dosen't know, how EXACTLY
should they be created, there's no chance to get Courier IMAP working.
Whatever greatly it is configured, it dosen't work, and no one knows
why. Until he does have a good knowledge in RFC documents, and bet me
there is not so much mankind that do.
I've never had to read any RFC for setting up courier.
If the Courier only didn't create the dirs himself automatically! The
user could then at least know that something is missing.
However, he CREATES some dirs, and he does it in BAD way so that they,
again, don't work. User should think "yes, he said that Maildirs are
needed, and he created some now, so this is certainly not the problem
that causes Courier not to work"
???
Which dirs?
If one wants to run Courier, he should search and study RFC documents
(!!!) regarding IMAP and create Maildirs by hand, exactly matching the
describtion in RFC. Then suddenly, whoila, a miracle, Courier starts
working.
What's so hard to type
apropos maildir
at the command line? This is a standard command to get help under unix.
$ apropos maildir
deliverquota (8) - deliver to a maildir with a quota
deliverquota.courier (8) - deliver to a maildir with a quota
maildir (5) - E-mail directory
maildir.courier (5) - E-mail directory
maildiracl (1) - manage access control lists
maildirkw (1) - set maildir message keywords
maildirmake (1) - create maildirs and maildir folders
maildirmake.courier (1) - create maildirs and maildir folders
maildirquota (7) - voluntary Maildir quotas
maildirquota.courier (7) - voluntary Maildir quotas
webgpg (8) - initializes maildir subdirectory gpg
and after reading of the manpage, to type
maildirmake Maildir
somewhere to test, and then in the users homedir to finally create it?
BTW: This is also documented in README.Debian, and that's the document
you should really read, at least before complaining.
I really DO think, that in 21th century, creation of proper directory
structure SHOULD be held by package itself. Courier-imap should create
proper Maildirs in /etc/skel and then politely ASK, if he should create
them for existing users too.
You could report the creation of a standard maildir in /etc/skel as
wishlist bug. However, as it's really trivial to type
cd /etc/skel; maildirmake Maildir
I doubt that all users would really be happy about that, because their
setup might be different.
The same as above also for your proposal to create them for existing
users, and the note that this is a very difficult job for the debian
maintainer, but a very simple job for the admin (feel the power of shell
scripts), because the admin only needs to do it for his setup, but the
debian maintainer would need to make it work for all possible setups.
If you just use pam authentication and use a standard setup, this would
be very trivially be scriptable for you: (I did not test this line, but
it should work if all directories belong to users)
cd /home; for i in *; do test -d $i && su - $i maildirmake Maildir; done
I don't desire to be unkind, but so far, Courier-IMAP has been the
package with the worst installation I have ever met.
Because you ignore existing documentation?
IHMO this bug report should be closed.
Willi
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