It is for the IMAP namespace, but depending on the IMAP server that eventually can translate to a file on the filesystem. For the UW-IMAP server the default is to store mail folders in your home directory, but if you do that then your mail client ends up looking through your entire home directory (and mine is quite large) for mail folders. Instead I use a subdirectory called mail with a imap_root of mail so the client should request folders as mail/FolderName.

In any case, I am not sure if this is proper behavior but it's definitely accepted. I use a imap root of mail in Mail.app on OS X, Thunderbird in Windows and OS X and Outlook Express in Windows. These all seem to work as expected.

The latest change to using a default delimiter if the server doesn't send one seems to fix much of the problem but the INBOX and Trash folders still fail. It sounds like other people are having the same problem with INBOX, in that the client is requesting imap_root/INBOX instead of INBOX. IMAP reserves the name INBOX to mean "the user's system inbox, wherever that is" and it should not be prepended with the imap_root.

Jason



Justus Pendleton wrote: 
Jason von Nieda <jason <at> vonnieda.org> writes:

  
I keep my mail folders in my home directory under a subdirectory called 
mail, and I'm using UW-IMAP. My INBOX is in /var/spool/mail/
I have set the imap_root to "mail" and it mostly works fine. My folders 
all show up properly in the list and it only shows the ones from my mail 
directory.
    

I don't think imap_root has anything to do with paths on the file system; I
assumed it was for IMAP namespaces.  Did roundcube not work properly with the
default setting for imap_root?