Carlos Williams put forth on 2/25/2010 5:35 PM:

I recently deleted a file in my Maildir directory called 'subscriptions' which was basically a text file. This file was in the Maildir directory and just had all my Inbox sub-folders listed. I was on the Dovecot list and advised to delete this. It is not something I should depend on and I should disable all my mail clients to show all 'unsubscribed' folders. I found out how this works on Thunderbird but I can't seem to figure this out on RC. When I go to "Settings > Folders Tab", I can then see all my missing Inbox folders and they're all unsubscribed. Meaning I don't have the tic box checked but when I go back to my mailbox view, I don't see them. How do I get RC to show all un-subscribed folders?

Obviously RC sees the folders because I can edit their names and choose to subscribe to them in the folders tab under 'Settings' but when I am just under my mail box view, I only see "Inbox, Drafts, Junk, Sent, & Trash". Basically the default folders it created when I logged in for the 1st time.

The whole purpose of IMAP folder subscriptions is so one doesn't have to see all IMAP folders available to him in his folder list. Let's say you're in an organization that publishes 100 shared IMAP folders. Do you want to see all of those in your mailbox view? Probably not. So, using the IMAP SUBSCRIBE and UNSUBSCRIBE commands you can dictate what folder names are returned by the LIST command, and thus which folder names show up in your mailbox view.

I'm not sure why anyone on the dovecot list would have told you to delete your subscriptions unless the file was corrupted or something. You must have subscriptions for RC to be able to display the folders you want to see in your mailbox view. See this for background:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3501.html