[Dovecot] Dovecot and Mail.app

[Barry Warsaw]

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I'm trying to convert a courier-imap installation over to using  
Dovecot, but I'm having some problems with Mail.app on OS X.  FTR, we  
use both Mail.app and Thunderbird.  Note that in the Mail.app  
preferences, I have a blank IMAP Path Prefix.  I'm using Dovecot  
1.0_rc15 on Gentoo, and Mail.app from OS X 10.4.8, Thunderbird 1.5.0.9.

With the old courier setup, in Mail.app I would see a top level Inbox  
folder, with an inbox icon'd folder underneath that representing the  
IMAP account.  That IMAP account subfolder would be the inbox of that  
account.  Under that, I'd see all the subfolders for that account.   
Something like:

Inbox
    Account1
       Folder1
       Folder2
       ...
    Account2
       FolderA
Outbox
Drafts
Sent
Junk
SmartFolder1
SmartFolder2

Note that a straight copy from the courier Maildir leaves me with  
directories like ~/Maildir/.Folder1 and ~/Maildir/.Folder2 -- IOW,  
they do not have .INBOX. prefix.  I tried adding a "namespace  
private" section, with separator, prefix, and inbox values as  
specified in the docs.

This gives me the same layout in the Mail.app u/i as with Courier,  
but there's a big problem: none of the folders under Account1 have  
any contents.  The folders are there, and in the right location, but  
they have zero messages (even though they certainly have messages in  
the filesystem).  Nothing in the Dovecot log file indicates any  
problem.  But if I hover over say Folder1 in the Mail.app u/i, I see  
a popup message like:

     Mail was unable to open this mailbox on the server  
"imap.example.com".  The
     server error encountered was: Unknown namespace

Moving over to Thunderbird though, I see exactly what I want to see.   
Top level expandable is the account, with Inbox under that, which  
expands to all my folders.  Of course Thunderbird supports  
subscriptions, which Mail.app does not, so I only see the folders  
I've subscribed to.  Clearly, there's some weird interaction between  
Mail.app and Dovecot.

Next, I tried removing the 'prefix' value from the "namespace  
private" section, and restarted Dovecot.  Now the Mail.app u/i is  
different, but all the folders have their contents back!  The u/i now  
shows:

Inbox
    Account1
    Account2
       FolderA
Outbox
Drafts
Sent
Junk
SmartFolder1
SmartFolder2
Account1
    Folder1
    Folder2

IOW, all of account1's folders live under a separate expandable  
section below the top level Inbox expandable (that section has a  
little world icon instead of the little inbox icon).  Account1's  
inbox lives in a different section from its folders, but it has no  
subfolders.

Looking back at Thunderbird, I notice that all the subscribed folders  
are now at the same level as the Inbox, just under the account name.   
I.e.

Account1
    Inbox
    Trash
    Folder1
    Folder2
    ...

I suppose I can live with the Mail.app behavior sans the prefix  
setting in the namespace section, but it's not ideal.  I'd really  
like to know why Mail.app has a problem with this!  Why are the  
folders there but the contents empty?  Is there any way to increase  
the logging that Dovecot does to understand what the Mail.app client  
is sending and why Dovecot is sending back that error?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

- -Barry

P.S. I wasn't able to use courier2dovecot.sh from the wiki (I think  
others had problems with running it on Linux as well, probably due to  
the different rename(1) syntax).  The courier2dovecot.py file was no  
longer available, so I wrote my own.  I can make that available to  
folks if there's any interest.
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