dovecot - Sep 2018 - Virtual Maildir as subfolder

I have a setup where google fetches mail from dovecot with pop3s and deletes
mail downloaded, so to do this I currently forward a copy of the email to
user-fetch at localhost which is the google login and it downloads from that
maildir.  But it means creating extra folders and I was looking at better ways
of doing it.

So I have an entry in my user DB file which ends with
userdb_mail=maildir:/var/mail/virtual/adomain.com/user/Maildir/.Gfetch, and if I
do a "doveadm auth test user at adomain.com? it shows the correct mail
location of the .Gfetch folder.  But even though it has 6 messages in the folder
a doveadm search and google both see zero messages.

I think this is because the index file is only in the root of the maildir, is
there a way to have a ?virtual root? inside a maildir like this?

Thanks,
Duncan