IMAP Namespace Craziness?

gilrain · Post by **gilrain** » March 1st, 2004, 6:53 pm

Okay, I've been using IMAP for a while and I love it for all the obvious reasons. This evening, however, I really got serious about setting everything up exactly right. I ran into some baffling problems, and I hope you guys can shed some light on them.

My main goal was to make my Thunderbird IMAP setup seamless with Squirrelmail. Squirrelmail requires that I keep my IMAP folders in ~/mail. I had been putting my folders in ~, since that was how Thunderbird came setup by default. I moved all of my folders to ~/mail so that, for instance, my friends folder is at ~/mail/friends. Squirrelmail is now happy: everything is perfect when viewed in Squirrelmail. Thunderbird is no longer happy. I can subscribe to the folders and see everything fine, but they're displayed very unattractively as a subfolder of ~! In the folder list in Thunderbird I have to expand explicitly through ~/mail. Three layers deep!

I do a little research, and I come up with the namespace options in (Account Settings > Server Settings > Advanced...). Ahha, this is perfect! If I just set my namespace to ~/mail/ I should be golden. That sure seems intuitive. But no, I still get my folders as subfolders of ~ and mail. I did uncheck "Allow server to override" -- otherwise it just resets it to "~".

The best I've been able to do so far is to set the namespaces to "mail/". This make all of my folders subfolders of mail. I'd really love to not see them as subfolders at all. It really seems like that should be the case when I tell it the mail/ is the namespace!

Any ideas? I'm going insane here!
Thanks,

-- gilrain

Post by **tanstaafl** » March 1st, 2004, 7:20 pm

See http://www.inter7.com/courierimap/FAQ.html#namespace

I got the impression Squirrelmail used Courier-IMAP.

gilrain · Post by **gilrain** » March 1st, 2004, 7:33 pm

Hm, I don't think that's it, unless I'm missing something here. None of the folders are subfolders of INBOX. As far as I can tell, my "inbox" is /var/spool/mail/gilrain, and is completely independent of the folders and general namespace settings...

-- gilrain

Post by **tanstaafl** » March 1st, 2004, 7:46 pm

The URL pointed to a section of the FAQ called "I can't create any top-level folders, only subfolders of INBOX" Since you said "This make all of my folders subfolders of mail. I'd really love to not see them as subfolders at all" I thought that described your problem. If not, then I can't help.

gilrain · Post by **gilrain** » March 1st, 2004, 7:50 pm

It was a useful FAQ, and thanks for the link! However, it does not address my problem. The INBOX and mail are pretty different. Also, I can create the folders anywhere I like -- but Thunderbird displays them as subfolders if they aren't in ~/.

Thank you for the response!