Hi,
I have a problem with Mozilla Thunderbird. I can't delete mail folders
that I've created, and I can't create subfolders of a normal folder -
although I can create "special" greyed out folders by ending their name
with a slash, which are allowed to contain other folders, but not email.
It's all very counterintuitive and frustrating, so after a year of
putting up with it I now want to fix it. I don't know much about email
servers, and I don't *want* to know, I just want it fixed.
Unfortunately, I've already been caught up in a mess of about five
different software applications, none of which seem to acknowledge the
existence of the others in their documentation. I also haven't found
any "HOWTO" style documentation that can bring some kind of sane
overview to the whole area of Linux email. I'm having to fight through
each of the applications one by one...
I'm using:
Debian unstable (on both a server machine and a client machine)
Thunderbird 1.0 (on the client)
Dovecot IMAP server 0.99.13 (on the server)
Exim 3.36 (also on the server)
I have available, and probably want to use:
mb2md 3.20
procmail 3.22 (I have no idea how to use it, but it sounds like what I
need to sort my mail into different folders - at the moment I just use
Thunderbird's filters, which obviously don't work when the client
machine is switched off)
What I've discovered so far is that I probably want to change from
"mbox" format to "maildir" format. This is hopefully flexible enough to
cope with subfolders. From the sounds of it, maildir is the best format
for all but a tiny minority of situations, so I'd be interested to know
why Debian set me up using mbox by default in the first place, but anyway...
Switching from one to the other is clearly easier said than done. I
really *hate* making manual modifications to config files, because
they're a massive headache when I update things, with the installer
wanting to revert to the package maintainer's version, and it's always
like a year since I changed that file and I can't remember why, and it
just hurts. If you use Debian, you'll know what I mean. So
instructions like
http://www.wlug.org.nz/EximNotes just make me want to
back away in terror. And anyway, that's for a whole different version
of Debian.
Does anyone have any guidance as to what I should do to make this
switch? I've already tried asking on the Dovecot mailing list, but they
basically threw their hands in the air and said it's an Exim thing (as
far as I can tell, Dovecot will autodetect whatever the rest of the
system is using). I've also tried running eximconfig, which didn't help
at all, but definitely reinforced my impression that manually modifying
exim.conf would be a really bad idea. I'd be grateful for any suggestions.
Thanks,
Matthew Exon
