Mutt and Maildir format + procmail sorting

Question

1.) I'm a little confused about my Mutt configuration. I'm successfully using fetchmail and procmail to download and then sort all my messages in the "Maildir" format into the $HOME/Maildir/ which looks as follows:

$HOME/Maildir/
-work (cur, new, tmp)
-personal (cur, new, tmp)
-misc (cur, new, tmp)
-whatever (cur, new, tmp)

So - every of those "Maildir" formatted folders receive new my which is all done by procmail. Now, what I'm confused about is the Mutt configuration. If (in .muttrc) I set folder to $HOME/Maildir, then Mutt will obviously tell me (and it does) that $HOME/Maildir is NOT a mailbox, because it doesn't contain the "cur, new, tmp" subfolders as it should in this format. The thing is that my mail is already sorted by procmail so that I have them in subfolders. On the other hand, if I set folder=$HOME/Maildir/work, then I have access to that one directory and not the others, because I can't (I assume?) define more than one folder. I tried to set folder=$HOME/Maildir and then mailboxes =work =personal =misc =whatever, but again - $HOME/Maildir is not a mailbox. I could create 3 empty dirs in $HOME/Maildir (cur, new, tmp) so that Mutt recognises it as a mailbox, but it is not otherwise recommended to mix folders with "directories". How to handle that? What I need is a single folder $HOME/Maildir that both receives and stores messages (set move=no, since they reside in the same place all the time, except they're in different subfolders). I would appreciate very much any suggestion.

2.) A little general question - is it for some reason not recommended to use $HOME/something as a mail spool rather than /var/spool/mail/something? I found in a few places that this is the only "kosher" way to do mail in *nix systems. However, I like to have all my mail in one place without having to move read messages from spool to storage folders. I often re-read them, answer some of old messages and moving between mailboxes in order to do so seems a little annoying. So - is there some special reason to use /var/spool/mail/ for new mail other than it's standard *nix mail directory?

Answer 1

There should be no harm in creating empty new, cur, and tmp directories in the root folder and not use them for anything. And even if you do use them, by mistake or actual intent, there is no harm; who says you cannot mix folders and directories? What if it's folders and subfolders?

Answer 2

There is no harm in using your home directory for delivering mail.

If you have a quota, deliveries into /var/spool/mail will not eat out of your home directory quota; on the other hand, it is possible that /var/spool/mail also has a quota, and of course, if your mail client wants to import delivered mail into your home directory when you open it, you need enough disk space there anyway.

In some sense, files in /var/spool/mail are still the administrator's responsibility, so if you are the victim of e.g. a mailbomb attack, there may be less of a threshold for the sysadmin to step in and, say, delete a few megs of tripe from there if your incoming messages have not yet been delivered to your home directory.