Re: [Evolution] Maildir account not showing messages

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> I have a Maildir in my home directory that was created and maintained
> by Dovecot.  I am attempting to use Evolution’s Maildir account type
> to show these messages.

I suspect that that is an unwise arrangement.  Dovecot does lots of
things that assume it has full control over the mail store.  It may
cause problems in the future if you start altering the contents outside
of Dovecot.  Can you not just use Dovecot as an IMAP server?

> When I point this account at “~/Maildir”, I see a top-level folder
> called “INBOX” with the many subfolders I would expect.  However,
> selecting INBOX or any of its subfolders shows no messages.  Instead,
> there is a top-level folder called “Inbox”.  This has the messages I
> would expect to see in “INBOX”; but it has none of the subfolders. On
> the filesystem, subfolders beneath “~/Maildir” look like “.INBOX.*”.

The "Inbox" in Maildir *is* the ~/Maildir folder - that's why it
contains the cur, new, tmp directories.  Each mail folder that you see
at the top level translates to a .xxx folder in ~/Maildir, sub folders
are .xxx.yyy directories. Each directory must contain cur, new and tmp
subdirectories.

The .INBOX directory you see should translate to the mail folder INBOX,
that is just any other folder and holds no particular significance in
the Maildir standard.

If your mail folder INBOX (& sub folders) don't contain any messages,
then check that they conform to the Maildir standard - the 'cur'
directory should contain all the messages with each message in it's own
file.  The filename of each message encodes the message status and
flags.

It could be that Dovecot is configured with extensions to the standard
that Evolution doesn't understand - extensions are sometimes
implemented as modifications to the message filename.  Dovecot also
maintains non-standard indexes which mean that it can find messages,
but their location may not be to the Maildir standard.

> Is there a way to configure the Maildir account type to make it
> useful in this scenario?  I get the impression that perhaps Evolution
> needs to be told somehow that the “INBOX” subfolder prefix
> corresponds to the top-level Maildir.

No. Because the Maildir standard says that the Inbox is the top level
folder, not a .xxx folder.

P.