everyone. I am learning to set up a dovecot home IMAP server using a virtual Ubuntu 12.04 machine. My intention is eventually to have a home server that uses POP3 to take email from several addresses and remove them from my ISP's servers, while making them accessible through a home IMAP server (this is similar to the setup described at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/POP3Aggregator, which explains how to set up the system with dovecot version 1, and is thus outdated). I intend to use the ISP's server directly when sending messages, and to BCC all sent messages to myself.

I've completed the basic set up of the test server: getmail uses POP3 to fetch messages from two test email accounts, and successfully delivers them to the respective Maildir-style new folders on the virtual machine. Dovecot then successfully sees these messages.

I have two questions:

1) I had to set up new, cur, and tmp folders for both of the test accounts manually to get this setup to work. Is there a way to get dovecot to create these Maildir folders automatically when I create a new virtual user account (e.g., when I add a user and password combination to my dovecot password file), or is it expected that I write a bash script to automate that task?

2) I would welcome any comments you have on how this approach could be improved as I learn to set it up. My motivations with this approach are 1) to enable archiving/storing emails from several hosting providers that impose a cap on server storage, and 2) to give me somewhat greater control over email storage without requiring that I set up and administrate a mail server from scratch (which I'm not yet prepared to do) (this follows the recommendations at https://ssd.eff.org/tech/email).

Thank you!