As I've moved from Courier to Dovecot as my mail delivery agent, I noticed a thing I liked in Courier that I'd like to duplicate with Dovecot.

I've setup dovecot with maildir according to this doc:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Dovecot

In my dovecot.conf, I've set my mail location as:

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

In webmin, I've set mail location to be:

Inbox and folders in ~/Maildir

Here's a screenshot of how my old courier email compares to how my new dovecot email looks in Mozilla Thunderbird:



If you look at courier email, you'll see Drafts, Sent, Junk, Trash as subdirectories or subfolders under the main "folder" or "directory" of Inbox.

If you look at dovecot email, you'll see Inbox, Draft, Templates, Sent, Junk, Trash all joined together as the same level as Inbox.

How can I setup my dovecot to have it look like my old courier email?

Like this:

Inbox
|
--Draft
--Templates
--Sent
--Junk
--Trash

Mozilla Thunderbird v2.0.0.22
Dovecot v1.1.11
Ubuntu 9.04

By default, Courier uses "INBOX." as the IMAP namespace for private mailboxes. You need to add the following to dovecot.conf:

namespace private {
  prefix = INBOX.
  inbox = yes
}

_________________
/ Peter

Thanks Peter it works perfectly now!

I did notice right now that the dovecot wikimentions this:

You can continue using the same INBOX. namespace as Courier:

namespace private {
  separator = .
  prefix = INBOX.
  inbox = yes
}

Is that "separator = ." important for anything?

"separator = ." is the default for maildir. You normally only need to change this to suit some picky IMAP clients. Thunderbird is not one of them.

_________________
/ Peter