On Fri, May 19, 2000 at 02:28:17AM -0700, Brian D. Winters wrote:
> On Fri, May 19, 2000 at 09:52:19AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> > I have a maildir which has mail delivered to it directly (i.e. it has
> > cur, new and tmp directories in it) but it also has other maildir
> > folders in it. Mutt doesn't seem to be able to cope with this at all,
> > am I missing something or is it just not possible to handle this with
> > mutt?
>
> AFAIK you are not missing anything, although I'm not sure unable "to
> cope with this at all" is totally accurate. I expect that if you give
> mutt an explicit path to open it do so just fine. My guess is that
> your problem is when trying to browse to the subdirectories?
>
Yes, that's right of course, I expect you can go directly to a 'folder
in a maildir', but then you nee to know its name of course.
> Perhaps you (or anyone else reading this) can answer a related
> question I have been wondering about for quite a while. Why on earth
> would you want to put directories other than cur/new/tmp in a maildir?
> This seems really broken to me. My understanding is that maildirs are
> directories which contain cur/new/tmp, not directories containing
> cur/new/tmp plus N other unrelated directories to confuse things.
>
Because it can make a lot of sense to organise one's mail like this,
for example I get a lot of E-mail from contract agents, so I create
a folder called 'agents'. After a while I get so much mail in this
folder that I want to split out the mail from one or two of the agents,
say fred and jim so I create folders *in* the agents folder for fred
and jim. All the other agents' mail still goes to ~/agents/ but
fred's and jim's mail goes to ~/agents/fred/ and ~/agents/jim/. From
the user's point of view this makes a great deal of sense I think.
> My guess from past posts is that you are doing this because Courier
> IMAP forces you to do so. Personally I think Courier is defective in
> this regard, but the rest of my rant on that subject doesn't belong on
> this list. IIRC courier also insists on beginning those directories
> with a ".", which probably doesn't hurt mutt, but can't help.
>
I'd really like Courier to not use that preceding '.' too. However it
doesn't *actually* create folders in the same directory as a maildir
except in the top level inbox. The 'hierarchy' of folders is created
by its naming convention, the above example would create the following
maildirs in the inbox:-
.agents
.agents.fred
.agents.jim
> Back to trying to provide constructive suggestions, how well does
> Courier handle symlinks? I've never tried this, but could you move
> your subfolders elsewhere and symlink to them? Or could you symlink
> to those folders from elsewhere for mutt's benefit? IMAP servers may
> chose not to follow symlinks for security reasons, but mutt shouldn't
> have any trouble following symlinks. This isn't the most elegant
> solution, but I don't have any better suggestions.
>
Yes, this is the way I first looked into and it can be made to work, I
started on a script to automatically create the symlinks. However I
decided it's probably easier just to access the mail using the IMAP
server 'locally', especially since I've gone through all the recent
process of working out how to switch easily from browsing IMAP folders
to browsing local folders.
The other thing that I've done to simplify my life is to separate my
Courier inbox (which I've renamed to imap) from the default inbox
which procmail uses for delivering mail other then mail which it has
filtered. In fact I may well switch procmail back to delivering in
mbox format because (as another thread here has noted) mbox format
folders show more useful information in the browser.
--
Chris Green ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Work: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www.isbd.co.uk/
