dovecot - Oct 2008 - Folders within folders?

I'm trying to migrate my emails from an existing server (University of 
Washington IMAP toolkit) to dovecot.  My clients are all using Thunderbird.

I'm moving to a new Ubuntu based server (old one was Centos4) and 
selected dovecot solely because it was the default option.  I'm not 
committed to it if it isn't the right tool for my application.

My existing server allows hierarchical folders and these are used to 
organize 20 years worth of carefully sorted emails. 

I can create a new folders on the dovecot server but Thunderbird 
doesn't  allow me to create new sub-folders within them.  I think T-bird 
is configured OK since this works on the old server.

Is this a dovecot limitation or have I configured it incorrectly?

ed beers wrote:
> I'm trying to migrate my emails from an existing server (University of 
> Washington IMAP toolkit) to dovecot.  My clients are all using Thunderbird.
> 
> I'm moving to a new Ubuntu based server (old one was Centos4) and 
> selected dovecot solely because it was the default option.  I'm not 
> committed to it if it isn't the right tool for my application.
I very much doubt Dovecot is not the right tool for the job, if IMAP is what 
you're after :)
> My existing server allows hierarchical folders and these are used to 
> organize 20 years worth of carefully sorted emails.
> I can create a new folders on the dovecot server but Thunderbird 
> doesn't  allow me to create new sub-folders within them.  I think
T-bird
> is configured OK since this works on the old server.
> 
> Is this a dovecot limitation or have I configured it incorrectly?
This is a mail store limitation, somewhat.

If you've opted for mbox, things can be tricky.  I've found for one
server I
use I have to create folders with a trailing / in order to be able to create 
sub-folders in them.  However, they then can not contain messages as well.

Maildir does not suffer this limitation, as it doesn't use a hierarchy of 
filesystem directories to denote mail folders.  Each folder is its own 
directory.

-- 
Curtis Maloney
cmaloney at cardgate.net

On Oct 8 2008, ed beers wrote:
>I'm trying to migrate my emails from an existing server (University of 
>Washington IMAP toolkit) to dovecot.  My clients are all using Thunderbird.
>
>I'm moving to a new Ubuntu based server (old one was Centos4) and 
>selected dovecot solely because it was the default option.  I'm not 
>committed to it if it isn't the right tool for my application.
>
>My existing server allows hierarchical folders and these are used to 
>organize 20 years worth of carefully sorted emails. 
>
>I can create a new folders on the dovecot server but Thunderbird 
>doesn't  allow me to create new sub-folders within them.  I think T-bird
>is configured OK since this works on the old server.
>
>Is this a dovecot limitation or have I configured it incorrectly?
You have something configured incorrectly. Dovecot allows creating folders 
within folders out of the box (as does any non-idiotic IMAP server). I'd 
double-check the Thunderbird config for your test Dovecot account against 
one that you know will create subfolders on your UW server. They worked 
exactly the same when we tested this functionality during our conversion 
from UW.

-- 
Brian Hayden
UMN OIT Internet Services