It's a combination between a bad IMAP server and an
overly zealous client.

What's happening is that the client asks for all mail
files, whether or not you are (IMAP) Subscribed to them.

The last I check UW-IMAPD, once you authenticated, it would pass
you ANY file that you could see.  Ask for /etc/passwd, here it is.
Lovely.

I've hacked imapd to use $HOME/Mail/ as the prefix for all
mail.  Keep in mind, any files in that dir will at least appear
in your mail directory as folders.  They won't interpret as
mail (though raw IMAP can get them).

You *should* be able to tell your mail client to only
"show subscribed folders."




Quoting Zach Fine (zach@zachfine.com):
> 
> Greetings. I've been running imapd installed from pkgsrc for a long
> time (IMAP4rev1 v12.250), and have recently tried to access my email
> using the built-in mail client that comes with Mac OS X. The strange
> thing is, not only is imapd serving all of my mail to the mail client,
> but it is also serving much if not all of the contents of my user
> directory. This seems more than a bit odd to me, I don't need to read
> my .emacs file as a mail message.
> 
> For what it's worth, in the mail client's GUI, my mail is stored
> within an inbox icon, and my files are stored within an oversized @
> symbol, so it must be differentiating somehow between a normal mail
> inbox and these other files, although it does seem to regard these
> additional files as mail messages. Retrieving my mail takes forever as
> the mail client insists on downloading all of these files that are not
> mail.
> 
> I first thought perhaps this was a problem with some setting in the OS
> X mail client, but I can't find a setting that should cause this
> behavior. 
> 
> But even if there's some weird bug in the Mac OS X mail client that
> causes it to mirror a person's directory on another machine as well as
> download their mail, why should imapd be sending this data? Why should
> imapd have access to this data?
> 
> The man page for imapd isn't any help.  Has anyone out there
> experienced any problem similar to this? 
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -Zach Fine
> zach@zachfine.com