Mutt and maildir format

Question

I am trying to set up mutt to use maildir format. I have the following in my .muttrc file:

set mbox_type=Maildir
set folder="~/.mail/"
set mbox="~/.mail/"
set spoolfile="~/.mail/"
set record="~/.mail/sent"
set postponed="~/.mail/drafts"

In my ~/.mail/ folder, I have the subfolders cur new sent tmp. So far so good. But instead of storing the sent mails in ~/.mail/sent/ mutt creates again the subfolder structures ~/.mail/sent/{cur,new,tmp}. And stores all sent mails in ~/.mail/sent/cur/. I find this confusing. is there any reason why this is so?

Answer 1

This is because you have set

set mbox_type=Maildir

which configures the default mail-box type for newly created mailboxes to maildir.

And the maildir standard says that a maildir X must have sub-folders {cur,new,tmp}. A folder sent is not described by the maildir standard.

Thus, when you specify as destination ~/.mail/sent mutt interprets it as maildir base path and creates the usual sub-directories {cur,new,tmp} there, if they are not already present.