1125367 - Rollup of unread counts from collapsed subfolder should be optional preference

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[WBT]

This bug is filed against what seems to be new well-intentioned behavior from v24.  The new "feature" added there is that unread message counts are added to the parent folder when that parent folder is collapsed.  It appears this was added in the fix for Bug 235956. 

In <= v17, the behavior was that if a folder had collapsed children with unread messages it would have a bold name but not include the unread counts.
I prefer this earlier behavior, for at least large pieces of my folder structure.  For example, I have a parent folder with the name of an organization that has correspondence I actually care about, and there's a subfolder which has all the marketing/newsletters/ads from that organization that I don't regularly read but it's sometimes nice to be able to refer to.  The subfolder might have thousands of unread messages and the parent folder, a much smaller count.  I'd like to be able to have the subfolder collapsed (because I don't care about its unread count) and not have that number added to the parent folder unread count. 

Bug 235956 Comment 43:
> On a Gmail IMAP account it does, however, count Inbox + All Mail, which both
> refer to the same unread messages. So at least All Mail should be ignored,
> in my opinion.  (Bug 918962) 
> 
> In addition, it would be nice to have a preference that allows to disable
> showing this for users who don't need/want to see it. :)

I share the sentiment of Bug 918962 Comment 6.

Bug 939462 is also related, but that bug has been specified to focus on performance motivation; I'm requesting a UX motivation and don't have a performance issue.

I think this should be accessible more for advanced users (e.g. about:config) but it would be better per-folder so that I can right click on a folder, go to Properties, and on the same tab where it shows the Number of Messages and option to "Include messages in this folder in Global Search Results" have an option to "Include messages in this folder in counts for parent folder when collapsed" (which per current behavior would default to true), or something like that.