best practice to have sent mail folder on dovecot imap server

Question

When I add a mail account to KMail (or most other MUA I suppose) the sent mail folder is on the local machine and I don't have my sent mails on other machines.

I'd like to have a sent mail folder in IMAP and I thought that there would already exist a standard or best practice how to set this up so that the mail is only transfered once to the MTA and from the MTA to the IMAP server.

It isn't that simple, is it? I'm using Exim.

Answer 1

Usually storage of Sent mail is a completely IMAP interaction. No MTAs are involved, just configure your client appropriately.

Yes, it's a bit inefficient, but e-mail didn't evolve in a good way.

Answer 2

You can have dovecot automatically create the Sent folder and auto-subscribe it, but with kmail you'll need to go into the identity and set the Sent folder to the online one.

In your dovecot.conf:

 mailbox Sent {
    auto = subscribe
    special_use = \Sent
 }