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Using Dovecot with a Maildir set-up, I am trying to get the virtual "All" and virtual "Flagged" mailboxes to work. I have gotten all the other typical mailboxes working (Archive, Trash etc...)

The information here (https://doc.dovecot.org/configuration_manual/virtual_plugin/) doesn't really touch on the how-to actually interact with the virtual mailboxes.

My 15-mailboxes.conf look like this (snippet):

namespace inbox {
  # These mailboxes are widely used and could perhaps be created automatically:

  mailbox Archive {
    auto = subscribe
    special_use = \Archive
  }
  mailbox Drafts {
    auto = subscribe
    special_use = \Drafts
  }

  ...

  # If you have a virtual "All messages" mailbox:
  mailbox virtual.All {
    auto = create
    special_use = \All
    comment = All my messages
  }

  # If you have a virtual "Flagged" mailbox:
  mailbox virtual.Flagged {
    auto = create
    special_use = \Flagged
    comment = All my flagged messages
  }
}

When I view the user's directory I see these folders were created:

drwxrwx---.  5 vmail vmail   135 Jan 25 17:01  .virtual.All/
drwxrwx---.  5 vmail vmail   158 Jan 25 17:14  .virtual.Flagged/
[.virtual.Flagged]# ll
total 20
drwxrwx---.  5 vmail vmail  158 Jan 25 17:14 ./
drwxrwx---. 20 vmail vmail 4096 Jan 25 17:33 ../
drwxrwx---.  2 vmail vmail    6 Jan 25 16:58 cur/
-rw-rw----.  1 vmail vmail  868 Jan 25 16:58 dovecot.index.cache
-rw-rw----.  1 vmail vmail  384 Jan 25 17:01 dovecot.index.log
-rw-rw----.  1 vmail vmail   51 Jan 25 17:01 dovecot-uidlist
-rw-r--r--.  1 vmail vmail    8 Jan 25 17:14 dovecot-virtual
-rw-rw----.  1 vmail vmail    0 Jan 25 16:58 maildirfolder
drwxrwx---.  2 vmail vmail    6 Jan 25 16:58 new/
drwxrwx---.  2 vmail vmail    6 Jan 25 16:58 tmp

dovecot-virtual:

*
  flagged

A couple other relevant configurations I have in place:

10-mail.conf:

namespace inbox {
  type = private
  separator = .
  prefix = INBOX.
  inbox = yes
}

20-imap.conf:

protocol imap {
  # Space separated list of plugins to load (default is global mail_plugins).
  mail_plugins = $mail_plugins imap_quota virtual
}

My presumption is that when I mark an email message in the Inbox as FLAGGED (and I can confirm the \Flagged flag has been set) then I should then be able to either (1) see a copy of that message in the virtual.Flagged folder, or (2) when I use an imap command to get the message nums or whatever, it should return that message that is flagged in the inbox as a result.

Side note: This set-up uses the php-imap library to interact with Dovecot.

Any help, or just concept of how the virtual/All virtual/Flagged directories work would be really appreciated.

ABsocnart
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  • Have you been able to make any progress on this? You might've figured by the docs that you need to define the virtual namespace. But I haven't got it to work despite having it defined. – Reven Feb 26 '22 at 04:28

1 Answers1

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I was able to get it figured out with help from the official Dovecot mailing-list:

https://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2022-February/124060.html

Eltharion
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    Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers [in the help center](/help/how-to-answer). – Community Mar 02 '22 at 16:33