110575 - Quota alert overly aggressive

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Peter Trudelle]

The IMAP quota alert gets thrown up way, way, way too much. Depending on the
operation, it can be displayed dozens of times, seemingly proportional to the
number of folders involved in the operation.  The really maddening thing is that
when I try to respond to the message in the alert, I need to delete messages and
empty the trash.  These operations each trigger further alerts!  To really get
my quota down, I need to search for excess messages across all my folders (100
or so), and delete them from search results. This results in the alert being
displayed well over 200 times, all while I'm trying to comply with its insistent
demands.  This behavior feels extremely arrogant, degrading, and exasperating.

Comment 1

[scottputterman]

cc'ing David. Do we have any control over this?

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

absotively not. Sorry, Peter, talk to the mail server guys. We can't ignore
alerts from the server because we're not in the business of parsing and
deciphering server error messages and deciding if they should be displayed to
the user

Comment 3

[Peter Trudelle]

Are you sure the server is sending hundreds of such errors?  This never happened
to me when I exceeded quota while using 4.x.  Yet another reason I need to keep
4.x around...

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

Currently, the mail server displays such an alert whenever we select a mailbox,
and your account is over quota. IIRC, it didn't used to be so aggressive. Doing
a search selects a mailbox. If you search all your folders, we will select all
your folders, and the server will send us an alert each time. If you're saying
that the same operation in 4.x with the same mail server doesn't result in the
same error messages, then I'm surprised. The only thing I could think is that
4.x for some reason is doing the searches offline, instead of online against the
server.  You could try that yourself, actually - go offline, search offline,
select the offending messages, and then go online and delete the messages.
Unfortunately, to delete the messages, we will need to select the folders, and
you'll get the alerts from the server. I find it annoying as well. What I do is
empty the trash (which I'm sure you've done). Then, I go to my Sent mail folder,
and sort it by size, and delete the largest messages. Then, I compact the Sent
mail folder, to reclaim the space (then and only then does your space useage go
down - sorry, that's the way the server works - we will automatically compact a
folder when you open it and there are a certain number of outstanding deletes,
10 or 20, I believe, but doing a compact will immediately free up the space.).
Hope this helps.

Anyway, if you don't believe me, you could generate an imap protocol log and see
if the server is sending all the alerts, since they will show up in the protocol
log.

Comment 5

[Peter Trudelle]

Of course I believe you, I just asked if you were sure it was the server.  I
didn't say that 4.x behaved differently in the same situation on the same
server; my server has changed since then, and I didn't switch this last time, so
I can't be sure.  If this happens again, I'll enable an IMAP log and try 4.x

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

I'm pretty sure it's the server - as I said, it now puts up the quota alert
every time we "SELECT" a folder, and each of the operations you describe
correspond to a folder select, as you say - "seemingly proportional to the
number of folders involved in the operation". I suspect they did this to be
deliberately annoying and make you clean up your folders as quickly as possible.
I remember when they switch the behaviour - it certainly made me cleanup my
folders immediately, instead of living with it for a while.

Comment 7

[Peter Trudelle]

Yeah, but they also made it much harder to clean them up, which I'm guessing was
done on purpose too.  I know I'm going to watch that quota more carefully now,
or maybe just keep a lot more junk in the trash.

Comment 8

[esther]

verified.