Apple Mail, Entourage can't see Courier-IMAP Inbox [SOLVED]

wayt · n00b Joined: 26 Jan 2004 Posts: 22

I need help with a vexing problem with Courier-IMAP 4.0.1, running on my Gentoo-2.6.14-r5 box. I recently added a new iMac to my network and find that neither Apple's own Mail program nor Microsoft's Entourage 2004 can view messages in the INBOX folder of gentoo mail accounts. Puzzlingly, those clients work just fine with messages in all subfolders. And Thunderbird on the Mac seems to have no problems with Courer-IMAP's INBOX. Outlook 2003, running on several different PC hosts, also has no problem reading the Inbox. And on the server itself, Mutt works fine.

Apple Mail seems not to produce a log or error message of any kind, so it's no help in troubleshooting. Its behavior is to correctly display the folder hierarchy for the account but to incorrectly show the inbox folder as empty.

MS Entourage 2004 generates this error every time it checks mail on the gentoo server (i.e. every 10 minutes):

wayt · n00b Joined: 26 Jan 2004 Posts: 22

I just fixed this problem myself. Here's how I did it.

On the theory that if I kept trying different email clients, one was bound to generate a useful error message, I installed Squirrelmail on the gentoo server. It displayed the Inbox differently from either Outlook or the other programs: it showed all the same email messages as Outlook did but also one more that had no date, from, or subject. Eureka!

I ssh'd into the gentoo server and cd'd to the ~./maildir/cur directory. After a bit of less'ing, I found it. Viewed in plain text, there didn't seem anything unusual or malformed about the message; it was received in October and had been happily living in the inbox ever since. But somehow it was flummoxing courier-imap (but only when certain clients asked for that message).

Anyway, I moved the message out of the maildir folder hierarchy and into ~. Like magic, Apple Mail, Entourage and Squirrelmail all now run as smoothly as clockwork.

The experience begs a couple of questions, however:
--why doesn't courier-imap have a verbose logging option to aid in troubleshooting problems like this one?
--why doesn't courier-imap have documented diagnostic tools for checking and correcting maildir problems?
--given that the daemon isn't bulletproof, shouldn't the ebuild be set up so that the act of re-emerging forces courier-imap to rescan all maildirs and rebuild its msgid.cache and database? (Don't ask me how to do this, tho; if I knew, I would have done it. I could find no clue in the courier-imap docs.)