1502983 - Folders no longer work with TB when connecting via IMAP for AOL/Verizon accounts

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[deilenberger]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.77 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Attempt to view any folder under /inbox in Thunderbird when connecting via IMAP to AOL's servers (serving Verizon email accounts.)


Actual results:

Error messages displayed, such as "The current operation on 'Cayennes' did not succeed. The mail server for account [e-mail] responded: [NONEXISTENT] STATUS failed - No mailbox exists with name - "inbox/Cayennes" "

or

"The current operation on 'Cayennes' did not succeed. The mailserver for account [e-mail] responded: [TRYCREATE] SELECT error - Folder does not exist or server encountered an error"

This and other very similar messages are being seen by a number of people - starting about a week ago.  Similar info in: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1228985

AOL has not responded to repeated requests for help with the issue, so referring us to AOL isn't helpful at all.



Expected results:

Should have opened the folders and allowed viewing, editing, filtering the messages in the folders.

Comment 1

[deilenberger]

I was finally able to "fix" the problem. It took several steps..

I deleted the Verizon account from Thunderbird
I then tried creating a new one - and that didn't help - same issue with the folders.
I went into the AOL (Verizon) web interface - and made up a new folder for every one that I currently had, ie:
   I had "/Somefolder1" - I then created "/Somefolder1 TRANSFER" - I then moved all the content from Somefolder1 to the new folder.
I went into Thunderbird and subscribed to the new folder - and the mail was there and accessible.

I had to do that for each folder in my account.  It took a few hours. But it worked.

Any ideas on how to avoid this happening again or a shortcut to make the folders recognizable would be great.  I had already tried unsubscribing to folders then subscribing to them, and renaming folders and subscribing to the new renamed one. Neither of those was of any help.

Comment 2

[gene smith]

Are you only having problems with subfolders of Inbox? 

I have a mostly idle standard aol test account for development testing and all folders seems to be accessible. However, I just noticed that if I try to create a subfolder of Inbox on any account it does nothing.

Comment 3

[deilenberger]

Gene,

Yes - they were all subfolders of \Inbox

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

deilenberger, do you still encounter this issue?

Comment 5

[deilenberger]

SInce I "fixed" it by the creation of parallel folders and copying the contents from the original folder to the parallel folder - no - I haven't experienced it again. That doesn't mean the issue is fixed, it just means I found a work-around. I don't see any practical way to reproduced the layout that caused the issue.

I realize that might not be helpful, but perhaps my description of how I did a work-around might be.

Comment 6

[deilenberger]

Wayne - answered above.

Comment 7

[gene smith]

(In reply to deilenberger from comment #3)

Gene,

Yes - they were all subfolders of \Inbox

I reset setup my test aol account on this computer with tb trunk. I can now create and copy to and read emails in subfolders of Inbox. So whatever this was got fixed by aol. So we can now close this as INVALID since there has never been a problem in TB with subfolders of INBOX. E.g., the popular dovecot server by default puts all folders under Inbox.