On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 12:05:19AM -0400, Owen Gunden wrote:
> I'm using mutt with maildirs, but I can't get courier-imap to understand my
> folders because they're not named INBOX.whatever (and I don't want them to
> be!). I would like them to be layed out as
>
> ~/Mail/INBOX/
> ~/Mail/folder1/
> ~/Mail/folder2/
> ...
When worlds collide ....
"~/Mail" implies a filesystem (and probably a Unix shell to expand the
"~") but "INBOX" implies IMAP. They are two very different things.
Many IMAP servers (like Courier-IMAP) happen to use a filesystem to
store the mail, but this is invisible to IMAP clients. An IMAP client
might ask for "INBOX" and the server may know that this happens to
correspond to a maildir named "/home/owen/Mail/INBOX", but this is an
artifact of the particular server (Courier). A different IMAP server
might not use a filesystem at all (some IMAP implementations have used
object-oriented databases as the underlying mailstore).
That's just a preface, though. There are basically two "flavors" of
IMAP -- UW (University of Washington -- home of Mark Crispin, the author
of RFC2060 and pretty much the father of IMAP) and Cyrus (from Carnegie
Mellon University). Courier happens to be of the latter flavor.
With UW flavor, the separator character between folders and mailboxes is
usually a "/", and mailboxes are often kept at the top level of
hierarchy: you might have mailboxes "INBOX", "sent", and "work" for
example, as well as a folder name "lists" containing mailboxes for
gentoo named "lists/gentoo-user" and "lists/gentoo-doc".
With Cyrus flavor, the separator character is usually a ".", a mailbox
itself can be a folder, and mailboxes are usually kept in a hierarchy
*below* INBOX. In Cyrus (or Courier) the same mailboxes would be
referred to as "INBOX", "INBOX.sent", "INBOX.work",
"INBOX.lists.gentoo-user", and "INBOX.lists.gentoo-doc".
Courier-IMAP, in particular, uses an extension to Dan Bernstein's
"maildir" (sometimes referred to as "maildir+") that stores all
subfolders as maildirs contained in one another (and always beginning
with a ".". Thus when you create a new mailbox named "INBOX.foo" with
your IMAP client, the Courier-IMAP server will actually create a maildir
named "/home/owen/.maildir/.foo".
So to make a long story short, what you are trying to accomplish is
going against the grain. I don't think you can get Courier-IMAP to use
~/Mail/INBOX/
~/Mail/folder1/
~/Mail/folder2/
It will try to create
~/Mail/INBOX/
~/Mail/INBOX/.folder1/
~/Mail/INBOX/.folder2/
instead (assuming the default maildir is "~Mail/INBOX").
> P.S. I've been testing with IMAP clients squirrelmail and Mozilla mail.
Pine has arguably the "best" IMAP client implementation (it was written
by Mark Crispin and the UW folks using the "imap-client" library).
Regards,
--
Rex
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