Courier IMAP cannot find my Maildir but can find root's Maildir

I'm running into a weird issue setting up Postfix and Courier IMAP on a clean Ubuntu 13.04 install. I'm using this tutorial , and am currently Testing Courier IMAP . When I try to login with root, everything's fine (this is part of a netcat connection): a login root my-pass a OK LOGIN Ok. a logout * BYE Courier-IMAP server shutting down a OK LOGOUT completed However, when I try to login with my own account, I get an error: a login camilstaps my-other-pass * BYE [ALERT] Fatal error: No such file or directory: No such file or directory The mail.log: Jun 2 13:47:37 cs imapd: Connection, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1] # this is the root login Jun 2 13:47:51 cs imapd: LOGIN, user=root, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1], port=, protocol=IMAP Jun 2 13:48:11 cs imapd: LOGOUT, user=root, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1], headers=0, body=0, rcvd=9, sent=80, time=20 Jun 2 13:50:59 cs imapd: Connection, ip=[::ffff:127.0.0.1] # this is the other login Jun 2 13:51:07 cs imapd: chdir Maildir: No such file or directory Jun 2 13:51:07 cs imapd: camilstaps: No such file or directory And the mail.err, not really adding something: Jun 2 13:51:07 cs imapd: camilstaps: No such file or directory I configured Postfix to use the Maildir format using /var/mail/%u where %u is the username. At first, I thought the camilstaps user missed his mail folder. However, it does have one similar to root's one: root@cs:/# tree -CdA /var/mail /var/mail ├── camilstaps │ └── Maildir │ ├── cur │ ├── new │ └── tmp └── root └── Maildir ├── cur ├── new └── tmp Then I thought the camilstaps user had a different maildir in the MAIL constant, however... root@cs:/# echo $MAIL /var/mail/root camilstaps@cs:/$ echo $MAIL /var/mail/camilstaps What's going on here? How can I fix this? For what it's worth, I'm on Ubuntu Server 13.04. --- With help from the comments, I found out something interesting / possibly useful: * There was an old Maildir in /root. When I remove that one, I get the same error when logging in as root to the IMAP server. * When I add a Maildir directory to the homedir of the camilstaps user, I don't get the error anymore. For some reason, the IMAP server doesn't look in /var/mail/%u (%u = username) but in %h/Maildir (%h = homedir). The $MAIL variable has been set correctly, so what could be the problem here?