Cannot delete mail folder

Using Thunderbird or webmail, I am unable to delete IMAP mail folders. Thunderbird complains about permissions, webmail greys out the “trash” icon. Strangely, using mutt (my usual mail client) I can delete folders.

Mail folders are owned by sympl:sympl with permissions 700

Any IMAP experts here who can explain/fix?

Sympl Version 10, Debian Version 10 on VPS with Bitfolk.

What’s the folder you’re trying to delete?

There’s a few system ones which are system folders (Inbox, etc) which are flagged as important and some clients may refuse to delete them.

I had an ‘event’ recently - MacOS Mail wouldn’t move folders. Trying it on the machine using doveadm told me that the permissions for folders (.files) needs to be that same as those for Maildir. Fixing this assisted. This MAY help.

@Kelduum it wasn’t a special folder, it was one the user had created. It was one with what are sometimes regarded as tricky characters in the name, something like ‘Phone & iPad’ and it appeared in the directory listing as ‘Phone &- iPad’ (including the single quotes) which should enable spaces and ‘&’ to be used in the name.

@pcollinson Maildir is drwxr-xr-x , folders are drwx------
I’d better do some experimenting with this. I need to establish how repeatable the problem is.

Some progress…
I have found out how to delete a folder in Roundcube webmail. I don’t use it much, and had to discover the folder management menu.
So this seems to be more of a Thunderbird problem, and the error message “Renaming not supported across conflicting directory permissions” is one that others Thunderbird users have come across.
The suggested fix was like pcollinson’s, but changing the permissions didn’t seem to help.
Anyway, as this looks like a Thunderbird/dovecot problem, and not specific to Sympl, I’ll look elsewhere for help. Thanks for suggestions…

For the record, this is is now fixed. I had to make sure that the permissions for all files inside each mail folder directory were the same as for the folder directory itself.
I also applied same permissions to the Maildir directory itself, but that wasn’t enough alone.
This may be a legacy of importing from a server running different software a couple of years ago. Mail folders don’t get deleted very often!

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