226885 - New mail notification presence and count based on "seen," not "read"

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[batkiwi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

Courier IMAP server running on RH linux on the back end.

When checking mail, the notification about new mail pops up if there's unseen
(new to download) messages, even if they're marked read.  It also includes these
in the count.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set Mozilla to fetch mail in all folders
2. Send yourself a mail from another program/email address
3. Receive mail in mozilla.  Notif pops up.
4. Read new mail, mark it as read (automatically or manually).
5. Move read message to subfolder "test" (what I used in testing).
6. Wait 1/5/10 minutes for Mozilla to check mail again.

Actual Results:  
New mail notification with "1 unread message" pops up, icon appears in my tray.

Expected Results:  
Absolutely nothing whatsoever that is user noticable.  It should probably still
d/l the message, but not notify me since it's NOT unread, it's merely "unseen."
(large difference in the IMAP world).

Note that you can mix and match.  If you move 10 messages to another folder, and
then get 3 "new" messages, it will tell you that you have 13 new messages.

Also, if you don't click on the folder you moved the messages to (so that
mozilla will d/l them), it will tell you these messages are unread every time a
new message comes in.  This has the VERY unfortunate effect on me of mozilla
telling me I have 2-3k new messages any time I install it on a new computer (I
keep all my old mail in backup folders), until I click and d/l all of the folders.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

yes, it is, but you can turn off this behaviour (at a rather steep performance
penalty) by turning off the pref "mail.imap.use_status_for_biff", i.e., set it
to false. I could try to fix this by also detecting that the number of read
messages increased by the same amount as the UNSEEN messages, and not setting
biff in that case.

Comment 2

[Andrei Badea]

I'm experiencing a similar bug (TB counts unseen AND deleted messages as new).
But what's the diff between "read" and "seen"? RFC2060 says:

\Seen       Message has been read

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

UNSEEN and unread *are* the same thing in IMAP. RECENT and unread are different...

there was a bug, since fixed, that we could get /DELETED messages which were not
/SEEN, and this would throw off the counts. But we fixed that by making sure
that deleting or moving a message would set the /SEEN flag as well as the
/DELETED flag.

Have you tried a recent trunk build?

Comment 4

[Ere Maijala (slow)]

And to get rid of the old deleted messages without the /SEEN flag, compact the
folder (right-click the folder and select "Compact this folder").

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Or, in recent trunk builds, file | compact all folders will compact all your
imap folders in an account.

Comment 6

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

This bug appears similar in the end results to bug 244671, which in turn I 
believe is a dupe of bug 65043.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> This bug appears similar in the end results to bug 244671, which in turn I 
> believe is a dupe of bug 65043.

both untouched in 2.5yr.  
Bug 65043 – shouldn't notify (alert, play sound) if mail is not "unread" on IMAP server

Anyone still see this problem