Where are mail folders located?

[casner]

I have recently opened a hosting account so that I can have mail service that allows me to use my extensive procmail processing honed over many years. Part of that processing is to deliver mail to several mail folders. I have found where my INBOX and DELETED_MESSAGES files are kept, but I have not found the pre-defined subfolders. I am used to an environment where the .procmailrc MAILDIR is a directory under my home directory, but it's not clear whether the IMAP server will access those files.

[joemuller]

By default, you can get the path for your mail spool from the MAIL environment variable. If you're just doing an ls in that directory, your other folders won't show up - anything aside from the inbox will need to be prefixed with a dot:

INBOX.Alerts = $MAIL/.Alerts/

[casner]

Thanks for that clue. Now for a couple more questions:

1. Can I create additional mailboxes at the same level as INBOX? I saw some other posts about the INBOX hierarchy having some legacy considerations, but I didn't pick up the answer to that question.

2. In my previous environments, I have used simple mailbox files. With dovecot, I need to use maildir format. Is the dovecot "deliver" tool available? I looked in a few places based on information in the Dovecot wiki, but didn't find it yet.

[kgc]

Folders are created underneath the INBOX prefix (and directory.) This is hidden by most clients - to deliver to a folder displayed as "Alerts" or "INBOX.Alerts" in procmail - $DEFAULT/.Alerts/

NOTE - the trailing '/' is very important as it tells procmail to deliver to a maildir rather than a MH folder. Also note that lock are not needed.

Code: Select all

:0
* ^List-Id: Dovecot Mailing List
$DEFAULT/.dovecot/

[casner]

Thanks. Based on what I see in the procmail log, it looks like $DEFAULT includes a slash on the end already, so $DEFAULT.dovecot/ also works and might be cleaner (it avoids a double slash in the path).

The client I use is alpine (or pine) in which having the folders underneath INBOX is not as convenient, but I can manage.

[casner]

Also, I asked before about the Dovecot "deliver" tool. Their wiki page for procmail says:

Procmail delivers mails into Maildir folders, if a slash is appended to the folder name (e.g. ".spam/"). But Procmail itself could not update the Dovecot index files. This decreases the performance a bit, because the Dovecot IMAP or POP3 server has to add new mails for the index files.

Is that relevant here? If so, where can the deliver tool be accessed?

[kgc]

The dovecot LDA is not relevant or available in our current configuration.