Decades late to the party, I've finally switched from POP3 to IMAP.

(Normally POP3 was good enough for me, since I only tended to do intermittent and/or emergency email work from my phone, saving the heavy lifting for when I was back at my desk. But my main computer has been in the shop for a week, leading me to rely more heavily on handheld toys, and the lack of folder access just go too annoying to tolerate any longer.)

I have questions, dear Lazyweb.

1) When I send a message from Mail.app on my desktop, it appears to be storing the sent message in the "Drafts" folder, and marking it as unread, as if it has not been sent, even though it has. I know it was sent, because I got a BCC and can see the transport headers. So, WTF? There appears to be a MUA-generated copy in both "Drafts" and "Sent" (no transport headers) plus the copy that came back to my inbox (with transport headers).

I do have "store drafts on the server" and "store sent messages on the server" checked, because that seems sensible. I do not have "pretend sent messages are unsent drafts" checked, because it doesn't exist. 2) I am using Sieve to filter my mail into different folders on the server. Mail.app (on desktop and iphone) doesn't seem to update the "unread" badges on these folders until I have first manually selected that folder. This is just-slightly-less-than-useful behavior, since I can't tell whether I have mail without clicking on each folder first.

Mail.app on the desktop seems better at this -- the unread badges update sometimes, possibly even most of the time (but not always). On the phone, they update almost never (but not never).

Would things go better if my "INBOX" folder had sub-folders into which Sieve was filing things? If so, how does one accomplish that, since Mail.app won't let me drag a folder into INBOX on the IMAP server the way it will let me drag folders into other folders in the "On My Mac" section. Do I "mkdir" something on the server? Will Mail.app even understand these nested folders? I'm using Dovecot 2, and it appears to be using mbox files. Update:

Turning off "store drafts on server" seems the only solution to #1.

Still no solution to #2. However, switching from mbox to maildir allows me to make sub-folders. The incantation for that appears to have been to add this to /etc/dovecot.conf:

         mail_location =

          namespace {
            separator = /
            prefix = "#mbox/"
            location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
            inbox = yes
            hidden = yes
            list = no
          }

          namespace {
            separator = /
            prefix =
            location = maildir:~/Maildir
          }

Then do:

dsync -D -v -f -u jwz mirror 'maildir:~/Maildir' to make a "Maildir" copy of the "mail" directory.

After doing this, the folder that the IMAP server refers to as "INBOX" appears to be /var/mail/jwz rather than something under ~/Maildir/, and I'm not sure how to change that (or if doing so is wise). I suppose this is why I still can't create sub-folders of my Inbox, and don't know whether that would solve the "message counts" problem.