On 11/30 04:08, Richard Rauch wrote:
> Indeed, doing that and test mailing myself produced "cur", "new",
> etc., directories, but attempting to get mutt to read my new mailbox
> met with little success.  Am I doing something dim, or is there a dis-
> connect somewhere in there?  (I sent the new inbound mail to ~/Mail/,
> which is already littered with some mutt "saved mail" folders, including
> sent-mail, spam, and a couple of others, all in mbox format.  Is that
> confusing mutt?

Most likely, yes, it is confusing mutt.

> Should I make a *subdir* of ~/Mail/ for inbound, or
> use a sibling path, such as ~/Maildir/?)

I'd use a subdir. I have a ~/mail/ directory which houses various
maildir mailboxes.

> If I can't get maildir to coexist with mutt's "~Mail/" folder
> collection, is there anything approaching a standard for maildir
> pathnames?  ~/Mail/mdir/ or ~/Maildir/, perhaps?

If only using one maildir mailbox, then ~/Maildir/ is the "standard"
location. Other than that, I am not aware of anything that comes close
to being standard.

> Also, what is a painless way to migrate one-big-mailbox to maildir
> format (or back again, for that matter)?

I've never had the need to use this, but you might try
http://untroubled.org/mbox2maildir

For moving from maildir to mbox, qmail comes with maildir2mbox.

> (Is there any kind of sequencing to maildir filenames, so that the
> original mbox order could be reconstructed if desired, or is mbox
> order considered "accidental" and not reflected in any maildir
> information?)

mutt displays your mailboxes in whatever order you tell it to. So unless
you have some funky (not sorted by date, sender, date+threads, etc.)
order that you'd like to keep, order is irrelevant. I would think that
the order it would display them in, were it not to apply its own sorting
by default, would be simply the order that readdir() supplies them. Then
again, I haven't read the code.

For a detailed description of the (official, as opposed to the
Courier-style extended version) maildir format, see maildir(5), which
comes with qmail.