481421 - Option to mount /unmount mailboxes on demand

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[earlpiggot]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090303 (like Firefox 3.0.5) (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090223 Thunderbird/3.0b2 ID:20090223175111

It would be great to see at some point an option to mount /unmount mailboxes in Tb on demand. 

Many heavy mail users, like me, maintain huge archives of messages in various folders, which they don't need all the time, but just now and then. I keep such folders away from Tb message folders both for visibility, efficiency and security reasons; whenever I need one I exit Tb and manually drug the respective mbox file somewhere inside local folders to make it visible to Tb. When done I manually take it away again.

It would be great to be able to define some message folders as mountable; then I would imagine them show up in the folder pane either grayed-out, or as normal, and with a click (and a Tb restart) they would become active/mounted or vice-versa.

I don't think it is something difficult to implement and it could be made as an extension. Basically, the respective settings would lie in prefs.js just like the rest for the rest of the folders, and they would be "commented out" accordingly...

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

xref bug 266175 (dupe perhaps?)

Comment 2

[earlpiggot]

Not really. The process should be transparent to the user, and it should apply with standard Tb mailboxes.

Of course, indexing issues arise too; probably the new index could maintain "offline" folders as well, and mark them as such somehow, so that they are not included in search (results).