[MlMt] new subfolders -- MailMate or Dovecot problem?

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On 17 Dec 2017, at 18:48, Bill Cole wrote:

> On 16 Dec 2017, at 15:41 (-0500), Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
>
>> To try to shrink a too-large folder, I created 15 subfolders.  For 11 
>> of them, though, the Dovecot IMAP server did not get the name that 
>> the creating instance of MailMate has; instead, I see subfolders with 
>> names like .foo.Untitled, .foo.Untitled-1, etc. This is true on the 
>> Dovecot server and hence on other mail servers.
>
> I have seen this as well. For me it has usually resulted in MM showing 
> both the "Untitled" name and the intended name in the mailbox list, 
> with one or the other bearing a "(failed)" label.
>
>> So: I have two questions. First, why did Dovecot not get the proper 
>> names from MailMate?
>
> I am not certain of the exact mis-ordering of events but it has 
> something to do with MM decomposing the creation, subscription, and 
> name-setting of a new mailbox into unrelated events that get done in 
> parallel rather than a process that has to be held together as a 
> single ordered sequence.
>
>> Second: what's the best thing to do to solve the problem? Rename them 
>> on an affected MailMate machine?
>
> First, use the "Mailbox->Edit IMAP Account..." command to edit your 
> IMAP subscriptions. Unsubscribe from any mailboxes in the "failed" 
> state and subscribe to any of the new mailboxes that you are not 
> subscribed to. Once you've made your subscription list coherent with 
> the existing mailbox list, you can change the names as needed.
>
Turns out it was a synchronization issue -- I was doing so much 
message-copying that the far end had not fully synchronized. When I let 
things finish, all was well.


         --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb