Running a dovecot IMAPS server

[Tim]

Tim:
>> It *MAY* be that kmail doesn't use maildir files in the same way as
>> dovecot does. 

Timothy Murphy:
> That is certainly the case.
> KMail stores the folder "Private", say, in ~/Mail/Private/
> with subdirectories ~/Mail/Private/[cur,new,tmp]
> (assuming maildir format is being used).
> 
> Dovecot IMAP stores the folder "Private" in the directory
> ~/Mail/.Private/ , again with subdirectories cur,new,tmp .
> I don't think this is anything to do with dovecot;
> it is the IMAP method.
> 
> I don't understand why this complication is introduced;
> the fact that kmail works without it shows that it is unnecessary.

I suppose the question is:  Which one is the odd one out?  Is kmail
doing it peculiarly, or the other, or is there no real standard for
either of them to follow?

> But I am not sure of the best way to move the messages
> from the old setup to the new.
> When I tried what seemed the obvious way,
> by having Local and IMAP accounts on the server,
> kmail got into some kind of loop because there were two inbox'es.

Perhaps another client?

I have Dovecot running on an old FC4 box, using mailspool files.  That's
turned out to be a problem with several thousand messages in some
spools.  I've been trying Dovecot on FC7 using maildir format, copying
messages over to see if I could improve things.  Maildir does seem
somewhat better, but I don't have equivelent machines running the two
things, to compare them properly.

Anyway...  Thus far, the simplest way I found to move a bunch of
messages from one place to another was as a mailspool file, splitting it
apart at the destination.  I did that the bruteforce and ignorance way:
Concatenated the spool file onto the end of my /var/spool/mail file, and
then went and got my new mail, letting my mail client handle dragging in
mail from the spool, and putting them onto the IMAP server.

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.22.4-65.fc7 i686 i386

Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5.  Today, it's FC7.

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