Email problem

[Derek Broughton]

Linda wrote:

> Derek Broughton wrote:
>>
>> 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 

Actually, you shouldn't have to set anything in dovecot.  The MTA - postfix, 
or something similar - or MDA - in your case procmail) usually drops maildir 
format mail in one of /var/mail/$USER/ or /home/$USER/Maildir/, and dovecot 
checks both of those and uses either one (though somebody had a problem last 
week where _both_ directories existed, and dovecot chose the wrong one!).  
Procmail really should be dropping it's mail into ~/Maildir/.  I'm not 
familiar with how procmail works, but note the trailing slash - that's 
_usually_ necessary to deliver to maildir format folders, otherwise they go 
to mbox files.  dovecot's INBOX is then ~/Maildir, and folders are either 
~/Maildir/.FOLDER or ~/Maildir/.INBOX.FOLDER, where the IMAP folder names 
are the filename with the leading "." stripped, and any other "."s 
specifying the folder hierarchy.

> (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

Firefox isn't a mail client.  Thunderbird, perhaps?  In any case, your mail 
client _doesn't_ move mail that's being handled by dovecot.  I'm saying that 
the client quite possibly has files & folders in ~/Mail, but it reads the 
messages from the IMAP server over IP sockets, and doesn't need to know 
_where_ they're being stored.  So, I use KMail with IMAP, and my IMAP 
folders are in ~/Maildir, and KMail keeps its own files in ~/Mail/ (drafts, 
inbox - not the same as the IMAP inbox, outbox, sent-mail, spam, templates,  
and trash).
-- 
derek