mail server configuration problem

[kronos1]

I’m trying to set up an IMAP mail server. I followed the directions in the Desktop Configuration Guide. So I emerged mutt and postfix with no errors that I could see. So I configured and started postfix and tried to email root. It seems to send ok, but when I try to check the mailbox, it doesn’t show the sent message and also says “/root/.maildir is not a mailbox”. So that’s the first problem.

I also emerged courier-imap and did the “1 LOGIN” check and that came out fine. I also tried to do a “mutt -f imap://localhost” and it asked me for a user and password that it seems to accept. But after I enter the password it says “unable to open this mailbox”. I checked manually to see if the /.maildir was created and it was (it shows up in root’s directory). Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[scout]

The classic way to do this is not to use root: setup your aliases in /etc/mail/aliases so that the mail for root is redirected to a normal user
Also, check that in your /etc/postfix/main.cf you have home_mailbox = .maildir/ and that your imap server is also configured for this (for courier-imap the settings are in /etc/courier-imap/imapd and are MAILDIRPATH=Maildir and MAILDIR=.maildir)
Indeed sometimes the maildir related things are looking for the emails in ~/Maildir and not ~/.maildir , they may also don't want you to use the root account, or require the foo file to have permissions 600, so if you still have problems I suggest you give us more food, and look in the logs (in /var/log/mail )
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[kronos1]

Yeah the home_mailbox setting was the problem. Thanks!