Wow, I sent this message and it just disappeared into the bitbucket
apparently. No bounce no nothing. At least, I can't see it in the
online archives. Or maybe I missed it, and no-one bothered replying?
I've subscribed to the list now, maybe that helps...
Matthew Exon wrote:
> 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
...and in a bit of followup, yesterday I tried just upgrading from exim
to exim4. Hoo boy, I'm never doing that again! Exim just refused to
deliver anything and I went a whole day without receiving any email.
Even if I tried to send mail from my local machine, the email ended up
"Frozen" (I've replaced my username with "<username>" in the following):
2005-03-07 11:00:05 Received from <username>@exon.dyndns.org
U=<username> P=local S=335
2005-03-07 11:00:05 <username>@exon.dyndns.org R=dnslookup defer (-1):
remote host address is the local host
*** Frozen
Not the most helpful of error messages :-(
I also found a magic, hidden setting of Thunderbird, in the "Advanced"
section of "Server Settings", whereby you can tell it that "Server
supports folders that contain sub-folders and messages" (or not, as the
case may be). Which helps a little, but I still can't have subfolders
unless they're "magic", and I still want the speed improvements of maildir.
