[imp] problem with Folder lists

[Joseph Brennan]

Chris Barnes <chris-barnes at tamu.edu> wrote:

> So we told Imp to look in the ~/mail directory for folders (very nice
> for the pine users).  But now Imp can't find the OE folders.
>
> Are we missing something here?

Not at all.  Pine and Imp are the ones you can control, and it's
nice if they use the same folders.  Likewise you might default
Imp's sent mail folder to be sent-mail like Pine.

For the PC clients, your choices are:

(1) Educate the PC client users to configure mail/ as the "prefix"--
this is called different things in different clients.

(2) Hack the server to always go to ~user/mail for mail.


Choice (1) is probably the right way to do it, but the popular
clients make it very hard.  They are pop clients adapted to imap,
and things like the server namespace are hidden away in advanced
settings.  If you can get as many as half of the users to do (1)
you should congratulate yourselves.

The allegedly fascist choice (2) makes it "just work" for users,
and suddenly they can see their pine mail with OE and all is well.
However everyone who learned to do (1) is now broken, unless you
further hack the server so that you don't add "mail/" when the
client already said "mail/".

We did (1) for a while and converted to (2) a year and a half ago.


Joseph Brennan          Columbia University in the City of New York
postmaster at columbia.edu                 Academic Technologies Group