dovecot - Sep 2007 - Two newbie problems

I've started running dovecot on my server under Fedora 7,
to act as an IMAPS server for kmail.

1.  I see my email fine on my laptop in an IMAPS account,
but it doesn't get updated - I mean I don't get any new email -
until I run kmail on my server.
This isn't a great problem, as I am always logged to the server with ssh,
and I just start kmail and stop it after a few minutes.
Then I run kmail on my laptop, and the new mail is there.

But I assume this is not the intended system?

2. I opted (probably mistakenly) to set ~/Mail/inbox/
as my base IMAPS directory on my server.
I'd like to change this to ~/Maildir
(I use maildir folders).
Is it relatively easy to do this?

I tried copying my email to ~/Maildir/
and changing the setting in /etc/dovecot.conf
(and restarting dovecot),
but for some reason I could not see the email on my laptop.

Any advice or suggestions gratefully received.

Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 1.  I see my email fine on my laptop in an IMAPS account,
> but it doesn't get updated - I mean I don't get any new email -
> until I run kmail on my server.
>   
Is that because kmail is downloading it from your ISP/email host using POP3?
What I assume you are trying to do is host your emails but not run your 
own SMTP server, correct? For the purposes of having access to the same 
email collection from multiple PCs (without needing to keep them on the 
ISP server).

TB