[Dovecot] getting Apple Mail and dovecot/IMAP to co-operate

[Jim Reid]

Hi. I've been fighting a losing battle to get Apple Mail and dovecot  
to play nice. When dovecot is told to use mbox-style mailboxes, it's  
not possible to create child mailboxes. Apple Mail whines "The IMAP  
command “CREATE” failed with server error: Mailbox doesn't allow  
inferior mailboxes.". I've looked through the documentation, the wiki  
and searched the mail archives without finding a solution. Can anyone  
help?

I've tried (and failed) to get a hybrid maildir/mbox setup to work  
like that shown on http://wiki.dovecot.org/Namespaces. When that gets  
plugged into dovecot.conf, Apple Mail blocks, with the Activity window  
saying "waiting for login" or something like that, even though a valid  
imaps connection and login has been established.

There's nothing getting logged by dovecote for both of these problems,  
even when syslog is turned all the way to debug priority.

Here's the current configuration info:

shaun# dovecot -n
# 1.1.16: /usr/local/etc/dovecot.conf
# OS: FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE amd64  ufs
base_dir: /var/run/dovecot/
syslog_facility: local4
protocols: imaps
listen: *, [::]
ssl_cert_file: /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem
ssl_key_file: /usr/local/etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem
ssl_cipher_list: ALL:!LOW:!SSLv2
login_dir: /var/run/dovecot/login
login_executable: /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/imap-login
login_max_processes_count: 8
login_max_connections: 32
max_mail_processes: 32
mail_privileged_group: mail
mail_location: mbox:/mail/imap/%u:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
mail_debug: yes
mbox_write_locks: fcntl
auth default:
   mechanisms: cram-md5
   verbose: yes
   debug: yes
   passdb:
     driver: pam
   passdb:
     driver: passwd-file
     args: /usr/local/etc/dovecot-md5
   userdb:
     driver: passwd
shaun# dovecot --version
1.1.16