Stupid question regarding Thunderbird and IMAP

[Fred]

On Thursday 27 July 2006 17:29, Jeff Kinz uttered thusly:
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 05:16:06PM -0400, Dan Jenkins wrote:
> > Fred wrote:
> > >Thanks to both you and John. It is definitely using the mbox format.
> > > I'll have to switch it to using Maildir, but wonder about converting
> > > the mbox to Maildir in the many existing folders across many existing
> > > accounts.
> >
> > The one I've used is called mbox2maildir.
>
> But how do you know what it does? :)

<smirk>

Yes, I came across that and some other options as well.

I think I'm going to have to do this on a per account basis, especially since 
I have *many* procmail recipies written for the old mbox format.

What's really going to kill me is the fact that the ext3 partitions on the 
server are NOT set up to index the directories, and some of my mail boxes 
contains thousands of email messages. So I'll probably do this for my 
low-volume client who need to be able to create subdirs.

Now, for the $50,000 question:

What is it that KMail is doing that the other clients are not? KMail has no 
problem creating subdirs though IMAP. So -- presumably -- there must be 
something in the IMAP protocol that allows KMail to deal with the mbox 
limitations.

I suppose the other option would be for me to alter dovecot be be able to do 
"the right thing" with the mbox format. That should win me 5 seconds of fame 
on SlashDot. :-)

So many projects. So little time.

-Freedom Fred