dovecot - Jan 2010 - uw-imap compatability hack?

Hi all
Apologies if this question has already been asked before...

I'm migrating from a uw-imap setup where the mail folders were in a 
subdir mail/ in the users' home directories.
All of the clients are configured with 'IMAP server directory' set to 
mail/ (Thunderbird) and it would be difficult to change this on the 
clients (there are 1000s of them)

I want to use maildir and I have converted the original mbox files in 
~mail/ to maildir format.
So in ~Maildir/ I now have:

cur
dovecot.index
dovecot.index.cache
dovecot.index.log
dovecot-uidlist
.Drafts
new
.Sent-Items
.Spam
subscriptions
tmp
.Trash

if I remove the mail/ setting from 'IMAP server directory' in the 
client, then everything works as expected and all the folders are visible.
With this setting in however, only the inbox is visible and attempts to 
click on another folder, say Trash result in the client error:
Mailbox doesn't exist .mail.Trash
I've tried various namespace configurations I found in the namespaces 
wiki example but none seem to work.
What I would really like to happen is for dovecot to ignore this setting 
supplied by the client and not to prepend .mail onto the folders it is 
looking for. Is there a clever namespace that will do this for me, or 
some other setting or symlink trickery? Ultimately I want to support 
clients that might have both mail/ and nothing set in this box.

Using dovecot 1.07.

kind regards
Simon

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On 8.1.2010, at 23.47, Simon Annetts wrote:
> if I remove the mail/ setting from 'IMAP server directory' in the
client, then everything works as expected and all the folders are visible.
> With this setting in however, only the inbox is visible and attempts to
click on another folder, say Trash result in the client error:
> Mailbox doesn't exist .mail.Trash
> I've tried various namespace configurations I found in the namespaces
wiki example but none seem to work.
You need to preserve the separator:

namespace private {
  prefix = 
  separator = /
}
namespace private {
  prefix = mail/
  separator = /
}