Re: [Hampshire] [OT] Dovecot and Mac Mail IMAPS

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 11:46:42AM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
> ** Steve Kirk <steve@???> [2007-04-16 08:46]:
> > NetBSD (hence OT) and dovecot.
>
> Personally I'd consider *BSD to be *nix-y enough to be acceptable on
> this list. I'd love to get more time to play and experiment with the
> *BSD varients, but that's another issue :)

I guess less off topic than Windows connections ;-)
I'd highl recommend that you do check the BSDs out - well worth the effort.

>
> > The strange thing, that I wondered if anyone else had seen, is that it works
> > perfect via Mutt on the local machine (either accessing the Maildir directly,
> > or imaps to the loopback) and it also works nicely using mutt 1.4.2.2i remotely
> > (now I've compiled in SSL support!) but I'm having trouble with Mac Mail on
> > Mac OS X acessing via imaps. It seems that it will refresh the view of the
> > mailbox ok initally, and you con open mails etc, however, if you move to a sub
> > folder, it seems to then start endlessly trying to update the view of the mail
> > box folder. I'm not seeing any errors in the dovecot log, just quite a few
> > login/logouts from the Mac.
>
> Not come across this before, and I moved from Courier to Dovecot myself,
> although the migration was on a Debian server and involved a change of
> server side software and not a complete server move. It went very
> smoothly.
>
> > I'm guessing some strange problem with Mac Mail, but it worked fine when
> > courier was providing the imaps service. Anyone else seen this?
>
> Unfortunately I can't speak from a Mac client standpoint, but if someone
> would like to donate an OS X capable machine I'd happily test it out ;)
> {It is on my list of things to do/acquire} My client access has been via
> Thunderbird {IMAPS} and Mutt {direct local access}. You may find it
> worth taking a look at the Dovecot mailing list archives, they are
> pretty active and there may be something there worth noting.
>
> As a quick thought, did you set up a completely new account on the
> client machine or reconfigure the existing one? I know that the two
> server apps in question handle things quite differently. Courier sticks
> to its guns claiming that it is doing things the right way as per the
> defined standards, Dovecot makes allowances for the fact that 100% [1]
> of known clients don't do things the way Courier insists on doing
> things. I'd start off taking a look at the way the namespace is
> configured - there have been issues with this and the Mac Mail client
> iirc, so dropping down a folder level may be having problems as a
> result, although I've not read up in detail on this.
> ** end quote [Steve Kirk]

I'm pretty sure that I reconfigured an existing account on the client machine
now that you mention it. I'll try recreating a new account from scratch on
the client side.

I'm not hugely familiar with IMAP servers, and Courier has always worked very
well for me so I'm not going to criticise it's implimentation.
>
> <<>>
> Actually, still thinking out loud, if you have simple reconfigured the
> existing account this could easily be the problem. Courier handles all
> folders as sub folders of the Inbox (nasty imho) whereas Dovecot will
> present them as folders at the same level as the Inbox. I had to
> reconfigure my clients to take account of this - and it was one of the
> reasons I switched.
>
> [1] this is the annoying issue of all folders insisting on showing up as
> sub folders of the Inbox for every client I've tested with under
> Courier, and Courier won't change as this is a 'client issue'. In
> reality this impacts all versions of OE, Netscape, Thunderbird, Opera
> Mail, Eudora, Mutt, Pine, Mulberry and several other clients I've tested
> under
>


I'll definitely try starting again client side, and take it from there.

Thanks for the pointers!

Cheers,
Steve