maildirs, dovecot, mail client help

[Derek Broughton]

wade at wadesmart.com wrote:

Wade, this is my last post on the subject unless you start using "Reply" for
your posts.  I can't be bothered to keep looking for the broken threads.

> I can take a single email message that was created by mb2md conversion
> and put it in the directory that dovecot sees and it will read that
> message.

Naturally.

> Since this morning I have:
>  Restarted my computer
>  Read dovecot and changed the default_mail_env = maildir:%h/Maildir.

I'm not entirely sure that's a good idea.  My default is practically stock -
you do have to actually turn on the protocols you want though.  However, I
can't remember whether the default is ~/Maildir or /var/spool/mail/$USER,
since I have one symlinked to the other.

> The only thing that I think is questionable is, some of the messages are
> type email message and some are type plain text.  Its odd.

Yes, it is.  Remember Unix always recognizes file types by content, which
might indicate those are broken.  However, in my ~/Maildir/cur, which has
364 messages, 6 are "Plain Text", two are "HTML Document" and the rest
are "Email message", and I can see them all.

... 
> under each one there are these files:
>  dovecot.index
>  dovecot.index.cache
>  dovecot.index.log
>  dovecot-uidlist
> 
> Actually, under almost every folder these four files are present now.

Normal.  Dovecot uses those - but if you were to delete them it would
rebuild them.

> I restarted Evolution abour 1500 and It now sees all my folers. Its odd
> what it sees.
> It sees each folder but some are subfolders of parent folders and some
> now are not subfolders, though they were.

That is likely an artifact of the IMAP "Namespace".  Don't worry about it -
just move the folders to the appropriate locations.
-- 
derek