[Dovecot] problem with subscriptions file version 1.0.1

Liz liz at se.rit.edu
Tue Jul 10 22:21:56 EEST 2007


I had noticed MAILDIR_FS_SEP, but it did not seem (perhaps I am 
mistaken?) as though any of the places it occurred were adding dots to 
the beginnings of directories. When I pulled up the list of possible 
folders to subscribe to in Thunderbird, the new folders were there and 
they were checked, presumably indicating they were subscribed to 
already. So I unchecked them and rechecked them again and then they were 
visible.

I used wireshark to see what dovecot and Thunderbird might be saying to 
each other and nothing appeared broken there. The responses to the list, 
subscribe, lsub and create requests were all "OK", in any case. Deleting 
folders works fine as well.

The suggestion of adding dots to the beginning of the internal files was 
also a good one.

Thanks for your reply,
Elizabeth Bermel

Timo Sirainen wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 11:49 -0400, Liz wrote:
>   
>> The first thing I did was get the configuration file working for 
>> Maildir. So I know that the problem has nothing to do with the 
>> configuration file. Next I looked through the actual source code to find 
>> any place where a dot might be added to the beginning of a folder. It 
>> transpired that there is a constant, MAILDIR_FS_SEP_S, which is assigned 
>> the value ".". I deleted all the occurrences of this constant, compiled 
>> the source code again, and ran into a rather interesting problem.
>>     
>
> I hope you noticed also MAILDIR_FS_SEP?
>
>   
>> When I try to create a new folder through Thunderbird on a separate 
>> machine, the folder is not visible unless I restart Thunderbird. I 
>> checked on the machine acting as a server and the folder is created and 
>> the subscriptions file is updated, and the dot at the beginning is 
>> indeed absent. So I see no reason why this should not work.
>>     
>
> First you could try manually the same thing.
>
> Check that all mailboxes really are listed:
>
> 1 LIST "" *
>
> Try creating + subscribing:
>
> 2 CREATE mailbox
> 3 SUBSCRIBE mailbox
>
> Check that it's found from subscriptions:
>
> 4 LSUB "" *
>
> And might as well check that LIST also finds it:
>
> 5 LIST "" *
>
> If none of that showed anything broken, you could check what Thunderbird
> and Dovecot talk with each others and see if there's something wrong
> with that. For example use rawlog.
> http://dovecot.org/bugreport.html#sniffing
>
> Also if you do this, it might be a good idea to change Dovecot's
> internal files to begin with a dot so that user is allowed to create
> e.g. "dovecot" mailbox.
>
> #define SUBSCRIPTION_FILE_NAME "subscriptions"
> #define MAILDIR_INDEX_PREFIX "dovecot.index"
>
> You should also check that deleting mailboxes works right. There's this:
>
> #define MAILDIR_UNLINK_DIRNAME MAILDIR_FS_SEP_S"DOVECOT-TRASHED"
>
> I'm not sure how it works if you delete the separators. If LIST sees
> such a directory it goes and deletes it.
>   


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