Strange email folder naming behavior/errors
-
Today I wanted to migrate a Gsuite email box to Cloudron. The box contained about 12GB/45k mails in about 50 folders.
The naming convention of the folders were like:
01. "main" 01.01. "sub 1" (not nested) 01.02. "sub 2" (not nested)In an email client I tried to move such a folder from current box to new box. This went awfully wrong!
I checked Roundcube what was/wasn't created in Cloudron:
folder named 01
... nested folder named: 01
... ... nested folder named: "sub 1" (Nested)In the first 2 folders you're not able to store mails, only in the "last" one and the emails didn't got moved (actually they disappeared).
When creating such a folder in Roundcube you get an error that a . "dot" is not allowed.
Isn't it very strange that you're not able to use dots in a folder name and that it creates subfolders based on those dots when created in a client?
The only workaround was to rename in Gsuite all the 50 folders and then folder by folder move everything and double double check if everything moved correctly.
Kind regards,
Marcel.
-
Today I wanted to migrate a Gsuite email box to Cloudron. The box contained about 12GB/45k mails in about 50 folders.
The naming convention of the folders were like:
01. "main" 01.01. "sub 1" (not nested) 01.02. "sub 2" (not nested)In an email client I tried to move such a folder from current box to new box. This went awfully wrong!
I checked Roundcube what was/wasn't created in Cloudron:
folder named 01
... nested folder named: 01
... ... nested folder named: "sub 1" (Nested)In the first 2 folders you're not able to store mails, only in the "last" one and the emails didn't got moved (actually they disappeared).
When creating such a folder in Roundcube you get an error that a . "dot" is not allowed.
Isn't it very strange that you're not able to use dots in a folder name and that it creates subfolders based on those dots when created in a client?
The only workaround was to rename in Gsuite all the 50 folders and then folder by folder move everything and double double check if everything moved correctly.
Kind regards,
Marcel.
@imc67 IMAP is funky with special characters in folder names, especially with Outlook. Avoid using
!@#$%^&*(){}[]:;"'<>?/|\Periods are gonna be hit or miss, so avoid those as well. Instead, dashes and Underscores should work:01_01-02 01_01-03 etc etcI'd like to point out that this is an issue with IMAP and not cloudron.
-
Gmail import is a complicated topic and as @murgero said gmail has a IMAP compat layer but it's internal storage is not IMAP.
See https://imapsync.lamiral.info/FAQ.d/FAQ.Gmail.txt for detailed overview of importing. Also, I am not on expert on this topic since this is a bit outside the scope of Cloudron.
-
BTW, for the "dot" thing, the mailbox separator in Cloudron is ".". This is why folders with dot don't work. If you create a folder named "foo.bar.baz", it is like subfolder bar under foo and subfolder baz under bar.
While using "." as a seperator is not a bug as such, using "/" as a separator instead of "." would have been a better choice for Cloudron but we didn't know this when we started (sadly, "." is the dovecot default too). And also using "/" as separator is required for mailbox sharing to work. We are slowly working towards moving the separator to be "/", step by step.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login