130749 - Inconsistent ordering of the INBOX IMAP folder names

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Kent Sandvik]

They don't seem to have any consistent sorting, sometimes some are on the top,
others below, not based on ASCII sorting, that's for sure.

Comment 1

[Jay Smith]

Running:
Mozilla 1.2
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202
Redhat 8 

I regard this a "mission critical" to any business that intensively uses email
and thoughtfully manages email and uses email to manage processes.

Have migrated from Netscape 4.76 on Linux Red Hat 6.x.  Migration process
"flawless", the folder sorting issue is a _tremendous_ mess for us. Our company
makes extensive use of IMAP mail folders (up to 8 levels deep) to organize by
company, department, project, correspondence, status, etc. It works great, but
now  the folders (not mail boxes) are not in ASCII order.

Problems:
  Leading underscores are ignored (sorts as if they weren't there)
     [We _must_ have a method to place a folder at the top of the list.
     We had done that with leading underscores]
  Case is ignored 

WAS (desired)

__Zebra project
_Alpha project
_aardvark deparment
Important Stuff
molder-fox
wonderful-ideas

NOW (not desired) the same folders end up visually like this:

_aardvark deparment
_Alpha project
Important Stuff
molder-fox
wonderful-ideas
__Zebra project

Comment 2

[Jay Smith]

Further notes:

1) Folders and mail boxes immediately below Inbox are sorted correctly.

2) My comments refer to all the IMAP folders and mailboxes that are inside/below
"#shared".

3) The imap is running on an RH 6.x server (not the server running mozilla); I
am not sure of version level.

4) All of comments _also_ pertain to the sorting seen in: 
   a) main "File" button mail folder/mail box list
   b) Menu "Message, File..." mail folder/mail box list
   b) Menu "Message, Copy..." mail folder/mail box list

Comment 3

[Jay Smith]

A) I have now tested against a newer imap, with identical results.

(This Mozilla is running on a Red Hat 8 server to which we are migrating. Our
old server [still the primary] is an RH 6.x.  I have tested using two different
user accounts, one using the IMAP on the RH6x and the other using the IMAP on
the RH8. The IMAP servers are looking at two completely different sets of mail
on different machines. I am getting the same results from both IMAP systems.)

   a) Red Hat 6.0 with kernel 2.2.5-15 and considerable updates (notably glibc
1.2.3-1). UW IMAP ver 4.5 release 3 from Red Hat supplied RPM imap-4.5-3

   b) Red Hat 8.0 with kernel 2.4.18-18.8.0 and all but the latest updates via
RH up2date. UW IMAP vers 2001a release 15 from Red Hat supplied RPMs (from RH
install CD). 

   Mozilla 1.2.1 (Xft build) from Mozilla RPMs
   Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202

B) In addition to the underscores, the sorting is also interspersing "folders"
prefixed with the pound "#" symbol, such as #ftp, #news, etc. Example:

     AardvarkStuff
     #ftp
     MyStuff
     #news
     YourStuff

   I believe that these # items should be sorted to wherever an ASCII sort takes
them; that's the bottom, right?

C) Additionally, this mozilla is showing "dot" files such as ".login". and
mixing those into the alpha order (i.e. under "l" for "login".

   The dot files really should not be showing at all, but that is a different
issue which I will check to see if a report has been filed.

Comment 4

[Jay Smith]

Hi Again,

I have discovered the cause of the problem on _our_ system. We had just recently
installed Red Hat 8 Linux, and with it: Mozilla 1.2 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux
i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202.

Due to discovery that our Oracle database character encoding was trashed, we
discovered that Red Hat 8 has UTF-8 character encoding by default.  We had been
on Red Hat 6.x which had ISO-8859-1 character encoding.

As soon as we switched Red Hat 8's default encoding back to ISO-8859-1, the sort
ordering of the IMAP mail folders became correct again.

However, this points out an important Mozilla issue.  Mozilla really should have
more control over the sorting in the sense that non-alphabetic characters (i.e.
underscore, dash, etc.) should sort _somewhere_.  Under the Red Hat UTF-8
encoding, those non-alpha characters were simply not being noticed when it came
to sorting.

Jay

Comment 5

[Jason M. Abels]

Jay, I think this is the intended behavior: to ignore characters that it doesn't
want to recognize. The problem seems (according to you) to be in the character
encoing on the server. What that makes me think is that it's right to ignore
these munged characters and sort by the characters it can recognize.

So, this might be a bug, but it's not the bug you originally described (as that
seems to work correctly). Suggest you re-write the summary line and make an
update that describes exactly what the problem is.

Comment 6

[simon annear]

Marking works for me

tested with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050105
and Mozilla 1.8b on Linux

Server is Exchange 2000

Folders sorted as

_aaaa
_bbbb
aaaa
bbbb

Presume this is the desired outcome

possibly some dependency on mail server ?

Comment 7

[Jay Smith]

Despite comment #5, I was *not* the original poster; I can't rewrite a subject.

Per my comment #4, the problem was "fixed" for me when we changed our Red Hat 8
Linux character encoding to ISO-8859-1 (it has UTF-8 character encoding by
default).  

In comment #5 a poster suggested that Mozilla should ignore the underscore
character when sorting.  I *strongly* disagree with that poster.  The underscore
is a legitimate character and is one of the few that can reasonably be used to
specify desired ordering.  Otherwise, people will start having to add "aaa"
before names that are to appear at the top -- that is not good.

However, I maintain that Mozilla should have control of these issues and not
have them controlled by the default character encoding of the operating system.

Jay