218265 - Checking for mail on IMAP gives errors about folders that cannot be SELECTED (/NOSELECT folders)

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Pierre Dumuid]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.2 (20030901)

I have a IMAP mail server that is fairly old and each fold can either contain
messages or folders.

The Periodical checking for mail on IMAP gives errors about folders that cannot
be viewed, and the following message is displayed:

"The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: SELECT failed:
Can't open Mail/Engineering Emails: not a selectable mailbox"


"The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: SELECT failed:
Can't open Mail/Engineering Emails/ANVC: not a selectable mailbox"

"The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: SELECT failed:
Can't open Mail/Engineering Emails/Events: not a selectable mailbox"

etc...

This bug is quite annoying, though I remember when I first switch to
Thunderbird, it didn't do it!!!




Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Pierre Dumuid]

Just a few notes, about my report... Prior to my report, I was using an earlier
build of Thunderbird (0.2a (20030807) the problem then occured, and got quite
annoying, so I decided to try the latest build to see if this fixed the problem.

It seemed like it didn't, hence I wrote the bug report...

Since filling in the bug report, I decided to go back to mozilla (my previous
mail client) 

After having a look again at thunderbird, I noticed that folder's that can only
contain folders are italicised and greyed in the tree..

A few of the folders were grey and italicised correctly, but a few weren't.  So
I decided to see if any of the files in the profile directory contained any clue
as to the difference...

I decided to delete the files in
Profiles/default/???.slt/ImapMail/my_mailservername/ and see what happens, 

After doing this, and running thunderbird, I noticed that as mozilla "re-built"
the folders we not made grey.  After walking up and down the mail tree, and
minimising the branches and expanding them a few times.  The "folders for
folders" then became grey italiced, and after logging out, and in again, it
stayed the same....

So I'm not sure what the deal is, but there ya go... I hope it stays as it is now!!

Cheers, 
Pierre

Comment 2

[Pierre Dumuid]

Actually, no, the bug is still there.
(closing and re-openning the thunderbird a few times didn't help with folder
classification...) Sometimes they were classified as "folder only" folders, and
sometimes not...

Comment 3

[Daggi Elehu]

WFM: I just tried it with the 040120 build and it works for me now. I can't
resolv it though.

Comment 4

[Ross Shannon]

Still there in 0.9. TB seemed to get the classification right if I created the
folder online (through my webmail interface), but got it wrong if I added the
folder as a subfolder through TB.

Comment 5

[Ross Shannon]

This is pretty much the same issue as discussed in bug 222638, but I'll leave
this one open, as the error message is the focus of this bug. It's not very
helpful, and should probably be suppressed.

Comment 6

[Insert Real Name]

I can confirm the noselect behaviour discussed in this bug for Thunderbird
1.5.0.8 and previous versions in that series when using an uw-IMAP server
(2004.357 cPanel in my case):
1) In the left-hand folder tree, folders containing other folders and/or
mailboxes start an IMAP select operation when selected by the user; their names
are ordinary or bold characters, depending on the read/unread status of
mailboxes under them, and of course the select operation always fails.
2) In the subscription dialog tree, these same folders are shown in faded
cursive characters and cannot be subscribed.
3) In the Search dialog, attempts to search in a folder with inferior mailboxes
always throw up the annoying IMAP select failure dialog, which must be OK'ed
before the search continues.

This has been going on for a long time; maybe making all Thunderbird
interactions with IMAP flags case-insensitive and case-preserving might make a
difference.

I'm sticking my neck out and asking that this bug's status be set to confirmed.

Shouldn't the component be changed to something like "General", or is the IMAP client part of the "Account Manager"?

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ross, do you have a suggestion on handling this?  reporter states "I cannot confirm yes or no" whether the problem is gone.

see also bug 329151, bug 317597, bug 166885, bug 182747, Bug 117664.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/IMAP_servers offers nothing useful on this.
Don't know how common these questions come up, but perhaps a new kb article would be useful?

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #7)
> Ross, do you have a suggestion on handling this?  reporter states "I cannot
> confirm yes or no" whether the problem is gone.
> 
> see also bug 329151, bug 317597, bug 166885, bug 182747, Bug 117664.
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/IMAP_servers offers nothing useful on this.
> Don't know how common these questions come up, but perhaps a new kb article
> would be useful?

How do we move these bugs along? Are the check mail and the search issues the same? bug 329151 has good info

Note: Ross appears to be gone.

Comment 9

[Nikolay Shopik]

reporter are gone too.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Ross writes "I've moved away from Thunderbird"