Support Start > Email > Advanced Email Questions > IMAP > Cannot Delete IMAP Folder

You can normally create and delete IMAP mail folders using your mail program or our Webmail pages.

You should only try to delete folders that are empty. Move any mail in them to the trash first.

In rare cases, you may find that it's impossible to delete a particular folder, even if it’s empty, and your mail program will show this error:

[CANNOT] Renaming not supported across conflicting directory permissions

If this happens, please contact us and we can fix it for you.

What is the technical problem?

This section is mostly for reference by our staff, although technically experienced customers may be able to do the same thing using the Unix shell.

This happens because the Unix directory permissions of various folders in your mailstore directory don’t match, probably because they were accidentally changed from the command-line shell.

For example, if you’re trying to delete an IMAP folder with permissions 0755, and your IMAP “Trash” folder has permissions 0700, this problem will happen.

The solution is to give all your mail folders (Unix directories inside your server mail folder that have names starting with dots) 0700 permissions. To fix a folder named “MyMail” in IMAP (i.e., a directory “.MyMail” on the mail server), you would use:

chmod 0700 .MyMail

Again, we’ll be glad to do this for any of our customers seeing this error.