using kontact and IMAP

[Derek Broughton]

David McGlone wrote:

> On Wednesday 01 April 2009 10:08:01 pm Derek Broughton wrote:
>>
>> > Also this isn't that important, but I have an "inbox" under both "local
>> > folders" and "IMAP" and all my mail goes to the inbox under IMAP, but
>> > some of them are falling through the cracks and ending up in my Inbox
>> > under "local folders", what could be causing this? I want all mail to
>> > go to the inbox under IMAP.
>>
>> If your IMAP folder is remote, I'd say that isn't even possible.  If
>> you're running your own IMAP server, then it's a simple matter of
>> something delivering to ~/Mail/ rather than ~/Maildir/ - but it wouldn't
>> be a kontact issue.
> 
> My IMAP folder is local. I am running my own mail server on this computer
> using postfix and dovecot.
> 
> In dovecot there is 5 options for "mail file location"
> 
> 1. Detect automatically
> 2. Inbox folders in ~/Maildir
> 3. Inbox under /var/mail, folders in ~/mail
> 4. Inbox in ~/Maildir, folders in ~/mail
> 5. Other dovecot location
> 
> Ok I can't figure out how to get any of these to work except for #3, if I
> choose anything else, then no mail is delivered at all.

I do something similar with masqmail rather than postfix, and #1 works for
me.  masqmail automatically does maildir delivery to ~/Maildir/ and dovecot
automatically finds it.

> I think this is 
> due to me not fully understanding the difference between ~/Maildir and
> ~/mail.

It's not ~/Maildir - and if dovecot actually says that it's a bug.  It's
subtle, but since the advent of "maildir" format mailboxes, it's been
conventional to refer to maildir directories by including the trailing /
(ie, ~/Maildir/) which differentiates from mbox _files_ which don't have a
trailing /.  The reason this becomes vital is that Postfix _does_ use that
convention and you want to tell Postfix to drop all your mail in
~/Maildir/, not anything without a trailing /.  As long as it's doing that,
dovecot should always find the right location - in ~/Maildir/.
> 
> I'm also somewhat suspecting this has something to do with my postfix
> configuration.
> 
> Ok, let me see where this question will get me,
> 
> currently my Kontact folders look like this
> -local folders
> inbox
> outbox
> sent-mail
> trash
> drafts
> templates
> -IMAP
> -inbox
> Bills
... 
> What layout scheme might you suggest?

So "Bills" is there, but not under IMAP?  If you _want_ it under IMAP, I've
found it's sometimes easiest to manually create a new folder in the IMAP
account, and copy everything there, and if you're using something like
procmail to filter, inspect the ~/Maildir/ folder and figure out where the
folder was actually created so that you can use that path in the filter.

The first thing though is to ensure that postfix (with or without procmail)
first puts everything into ~/Maildir/, then work forward from there.
-- 
derek