Re: folders not visible on copied mail folders

Steffen Kaiser Tue, 17 Jul 2018 22:23:59 -0700

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On Tue, 17 Jul 2018, Mark Foley wrote:

On Tue, 17 Jul 2018 08:06:24 +0200 Steffen Kaiser <skdove...@inf.h-brs.de> 
wrote:


On Mon, 16 Jul 2018, Mark Foley wrote:

We had a user quit recently.  Three days ago I copied his entire Maildir folder 
to another user
to that user's Maildir/.JoesEmail.  I changed ownership and made the permission 
'chmod -R
og-rwx .', just like all the other files/directories of the new owner.  This 
didn't work to show
the new folder.  Today, in his Thunderbird client, I subscribed to the 
'JoesEmail' folder.  I
restarted dovecot and restarted Thunderbird.

In Thunderbird, the 'JoesEmail' folder now shows, but it is empty and shows 
none of the
subordinate mail folders.  I ran 'doveadm index -u newowner JoesEmail' and
'doveadm force-resync -u newowner JoesEmail'.  This didn't help.

I did this once before with a previous user who quit and only changed 
ownership, no
subscribing, no doveadm, and that worked.

What am I doing wrong?


Your description might be interpreted one way or another, esp. "copied his
entire Maildir folder ... to that user's Maildir/.JoesEmail".

Also, it depends on how you have configured mail_location.

If this means that you have:
Maildir/.JoesEmail/{new,cur,tmp}
Maildir/.JoesEmail/.mailbox/{new,cur,tmp}
Maildir/.JoesEmail/.mailbox.submailbox/{new,cur,tmp}
now, that will clash with the standard Maildir format:
https://wiki2.dovecot.org/MailboxFormat/Maildir

You would need to move the subfolders with a leading dot of .JoesEmail
into:
Maildir/.JoesEmail/{new,cur,tmp}
Maildir/.JoesEmail.mailbox/{new,cur,tmp}
Maildir/.JoesEmail.mailbox.submailbox/{new,cur,tmp}

If you use :LAYOUT=fs to mail_location, .JoesEmail should spell JoesEmail

Subscription is needed only, if the mail client "displays subscribed
folders only" or does not "display all folders". The meaning of the
setting varies from client to client.

Another way would to keep the other account and share it via ACLs:
https://wiki2.dovecot.org/SharedMailboxes/Shared

Steffen Kaiser


Steffen, thanks for your reply. I did have the copied folders as shown in your 
first example. I
changed that to what you show as the remedy. The target user's Maildir folder 
now has:

drwx------  5 mpress domusers   4096 2017-06-28 20:07 .Deleted\ Messages.Junk/
drwx------  5 mpress domusers   4096 2018-07-16 23:22 .Delta\ Dental/
drwx------ 21 mpress domusers   4096 2018-07-17 16:48 .Dennis\ Email/
drwx------  5 mpress domusers   4096 2018-07-16 23:15 .Dennis\ Email.Deleted\ 
Items/
drwx------  5 mpress domusers   4096 2018-07-16 23:15 .Dennis\ Email.Deleted\ 
Items.Sent/
drwx------  5 mpress domusers   4096 2018-07-17 17:02 .Drafts/
drwx------  5 mpress domusers   4096 2018-07-17 16:35 .ESI/

Where '.Dennis Email' is the folder for the old user. I copied the old user's 
'Maildir/.Deleted Items'
and 'Maildir/.Deleted Items/Sent' to the target user's 'Maildir/.Dennis 
Email.Deleted Items'
and 'Maildir/.Deleted Items/Sent, respective. That how I understood what you 
advised. There are
more such subfolders, but I thought I'd try this one first.

However, still only the "Dennis Email" folder shows in the mail client, empty, 
no sub-folders
even though "Deleted Items.Sent/cur" has plenty of mail files (1522).

I did try running 'doveadm index -u mpress "Dennis Email"', again; and 
restarting dovecot and
thunderbird again, but still nothing.


First check if Dovecot thinks the folders are there:

doveadm mailbox list -u "mpress" | grep Dennis

Then make sure that each of the three folders contain the cur, new, tmpsubfolders.


Does the Dovecot log contains something?

- --Steffen Kaiser

Re: folders not visible on copied mail folders

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