1829734 - Unified View uses same name for all types of folders in an account

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[Albert]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3650.1 Iron Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

If you use an IMAP account with multiple namespaces, and have other accounts accessible to you view Other Users / Shared Folders, the additional special use folders are all named exactly the same as the account's special folders in Unified View.

Actual results:

Say I have access to 3 sent folders through one account. Normal view shows something like:

Inbox
Sent
Trash
Drafts
Other Users
|-> bob
|-> Sent
|-> Drafts
|-> Trash
Shared Folders
|-> group
|-> Sent
|-> Drafts
|-> Trash

In normal view, it's perfectly clear what's going on. However, in Unified View, everything is named the same and you see stuff like this:

Inbox
Trash
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname
Drafts
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname
Junk
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname
Sent
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname

And this is just with access to 3 mailboxes through one account. The problem gets worse if that increases.

The problem here is that only the account is used to label the mailboxes in Unified View. Since these are not necessarily unique, this leads to duplicate names.

Since the order can be arbitrary, I can't even count on the first one being a particular Sent folder, for example. You basically have to click on all of them to figure out what is what, which is completely impractical.

Expected results:

Ideally, for mailboxes under Other Users and Shared Folders, some kind of identifier needs to be added to make this clearer. e.g.

Inbox
Trash
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname (bob)
-> account@hostname (group)
Drafts
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname (bob)
-> account@hostname (group)
Junk
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname (bob)
-> account@hostname (group)
Sent
-> account@hostname
-> account@hostname (bob)
-> account@hostname (group)

The label could be taken from the parent folder within Other Users / Shared Folders, for example.

The Unified View is imperative for me since I have 15-20 IMAP accounts and thus without this, I won't notice accounts that have new messages in the INBOX since I would have to scroll a lot in the normal view. The tradeoff with that is that it makes accessing messages in the special folders more difficult, for accounts with multiple sub mailboxes.

Comment 1

[Albert]

Somewhat related to this is also the fact that sub INBOXes don't show up in Unified view for Inboxes at all.

This isn't a bug per se; RFC 6154 doesn't define any SPECIAL USE attribute for Inbox. Don't know why they didn't, because that would be really useful here. However, I believe XLIST does have an \Inbox, although I don't know where the official spec is so hard to say (but I have seen IMAP servers return \Inbox in XLIST responses, just not LIST SPECIAL USE responses).

In the meantime, perhaps folders named "INBOX" or with an \Inbox in the XLIST response should also show up under the Inbox tree, instead of being clumped with the other "non special use" folders, since technically the inboxes should show up under the Inbox tree in this view.