KMail + IMAP - help urgently sought

[Tim]

On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 13:26 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I'm running dovecot on my desktop,
> and running kmail + IMAP on my laptops,
> specifying the desktop as IMAP server
> (the idea being to keep email on the laptops in sync).
> 
> This has always had problems with kmail hanging,
> and now it has become completely unusable.
> 
> I think the problem is that /var/spool/mail/* on the desktop
> has become too large.

A common problem with using IMAP is that people leave all their mail in
their inbox, and something has a hard time dealing with the mass.
Whether that be the client or the server.

It is generally best to move mail out of the inbox at some time or
other, and purge the inbox (some clients only ever *mark* mail to be
deleted, and require manual or scheduled purging).

The non-inbox mail folders a user creates are usually stored within
their own homespace (though an IMAP server could be configured to keep
them all somewhere in /var).  For some systems, keeping them separate is
an advantage (users fill their own spaces, and only cause themselves
problems if they overdo it).

> Does one really have to keep email in mbox format in this directory
> if running an IMAP server?
> Is IMAP incompatible with maildir format?

No.  You can use whatever schemes your IMAP server supports.  That's
configured by the server, the client doesn't care how, or where, the
server stores the mail.  Just don't confuse things by using the client
to directly access the files that the IMAP server serves, always use
IMAP.

I've only played with Dovecot IMAP on FC4, and with mbox storage being
used.  I didn't succeed at trying other schemes or Dovecot on later
versions of Fedora - it didn't start up.  I haven't put a great deal of
effort into that, though.  I have to, sometime soon, as FC4 is past the
end of its life, and the mail server's creaking hideously slowly.  I've
heard it said that Dovecot is better with maildir, and I can see that
it'd definitely awful with mbox and a lot of mail.

-- 
(This box runs FC5, my others run FC4 & FC6, in case that's
 important to the thread.)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.