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I have been using kmail with the maildir format for some time now and have had no problems. I have quite a few folders other than the standard inbox etc. One such folder is called eg. oldbackup, which was created by kmail.

Now, however, I would like to access this directory from mutt and find that kmail uses a different directory structure than expected. The directory ~/Mail/oldbackup exists and has the directories cur, new and tmp, however these directories are empty. Instead there is another directory called .oldbackup.directory, which contains my mail. This directory cannot be easily found by mutt. Is it that I have misunderstood the maildir format, or is it that kmail uses a proprietory format? If so, is this documented somewhere? The faq section 6.6 implies to me that kmail using maildir should be compatible with mutt.

Another test I tried, was copy a maildir, which was written to by procmail (which supports maildir), to my ~/Mail directory. Kmail seems to support this fully. So I think the problem is with folders that are created by kmail. It should not be too difficult to manually rename the directories so that both mail clients can read the same mail, but I would like to know if others see this as a bug or a feature.

Thanks for the quick reply. I have since tested creating a new mail folder and it seems to have been created correctly, without the prepended dot. The previous folders were created with a previous version of kmail with maildir specified, but perhaps back then kmail wasn't adhering to the standard properly.

Update:

With the latest release of kmail, I created a new folder called "testnested". I then created a new subfolder called "nested". I copied a mail into each of these. This is the output of find|grep nested:

./testnested
./testnested/cur
./testnested/cur/1053675298.31081.bqQx:2,S
./testnested/new
./testnested/tmp
./.testnested.index.sorted
./.testnested.index.ids
./.testnested.index
./.testnested.directory
./.testnested.directory/testnested
./.testnested.directory/testnested/cur
./.testnested.directory/testnested/cur/1053675302.31081.J4Hc:2,S
./.testnested.directory/testnested/new
./.testnested.directory/testnested/tmp
./.testnested.directory/.testnested.index.ids
./.testnested.directory/.testnested.index

So it seems that the contents of the subfolders are put into the .<folder>.directory/<subfolder> directory.

This does not seem to be the same as the format describe in http://www.courier-mta.org/maildir.html, which states: "Folders are additional subdirectories in the maildir whose names begin with a period: such as .Drafts or .Sent." They also describe a flat format for storing sub-sub folders.

Is the site I quoted a recognised standard?
I don't think the kmail format compatible with mutt with regard to subfolders (maybe mutt can't handle them at all?)
Does procmail write to subfolders in the same format as kmail?

What I would like to do is use a combination of fetchmail, postfix and procmail as well as kmail to get mail from various accounts and put them in one maildir. This mail should be readable from kmail and mutt. Shouldn't be that hard :-)

Quoted

Original von anda_skoa

I guess it would be a good idea to ask that on the KMail mailinglist.

http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kmail

_

I am not a fan of mailing lists as I think spammers use them to get email addresses. I am not convinced that the technique of mangling the email address works either. Anyway, I will search through the list and send in a question if I don't get a reply here.