Re: [Evolution] Maildir account not showing messages

[Braden McDaniel <braden endoframe com>]

On Sat, 2020-07-11 at 11:07 +0100, Pete Biggs wrote:
> > 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?

I can.  (I have in the past.)  I thought having Evolution use the
Maildir folder directly would be more efficient; but I was unaware that
Dovecot would not work well with this.

> > 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.

Yes, I understand that.  (And they do.)

> 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.

To be clear, there is no ".INBOX" subdirectory.  All subdirectories
under the Maildir (aside from "new", "cur", and "tmp") are of the form
".INBOX.*" (and these correspond to subfolders under the root Inbox
from the IMAP perspective).

> 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.

Well, it is.  It's just that Dovecot's decided that its subfolders
should be prefixed with ".INBOX"

It seems like Dovecot and Evolution don't quite agree about how to
interpret the structure of a Maildir folder.  Perhaps that's because,
as you suggest, Dovecot is doing something proprietary.  But it really
doesn't matter if Evolution and Dovecot should never share a Maildir
folder as I was attempting to do.

Thank you for the insight.


-- 
Braden McDaniel <braden endoframe com>