Email problem

[Linda]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Linda wrote:
>
>   
>> I have a strange email problem and have not had any luck tracking down.
>> I currently have an imap server using dovecot with maildir. I use
>> fetchmail and procmail to sort and deliver mail. Periodically we will
>> have a totally blank email.  When I look in the procmail.log I have an
>> error message
>>
>> Couldn't create or rename temp file "home/username/Mail/new/msg.whatever"
>>
>> If I go to var/mail/username the message is there and in the users
>> /home/username/Mail/new directory I have a 0 byte file
>>     
>
> I would suggest that it's a really bad idea to be delivering mail to ~/Mail 
> - the defacto standard for IMAP is ~/Maildir, and ~/Mail is usually used by 
> your mail client.  I suspect some sort of collision.
>
>   

I'm sorry I really don't understand how this works. I set the maildir 
variable in dovecot to  /%h/Mail you are saying it should be set to 
~/Maildir  (makes sense since this is what the default config has) 
however if mail that is not delivered to a subfolder in /%h/Mail by 
procmail is delivered to ~/Maildir how does the new Mail in ~/Maildir 
get accessed and moved from there to /%h/Mail/cur by firefox when it is 
read?  I read enough to sort of understand how the IMAP server worked 
and to get a working set up, but am very far from really understanding 
the process.
                    Thanks
                     Linda