Open Bug 1919410 Opened 1 year ago Updated 1 year ago

Subscribing to new folder doesn't always immediately appear in folder list

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Folder and Message Lists
Version:
Thunderbird 128
Platform:
x86_64
Linux
Type:
defect

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: dwreski, Unassigned)

References

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/102.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Start thunderbird
  2. Create new mbox folder outside of thunderbird
  3. Right-click on account in Folders pane, select Subscribe
  4. Scroll through list of folders to locate the folder you'd like to subscribe to
  5. Highlight new folder, click it to select and "subscribe"
  6. Click "OK"

Actual results:

New chosen folder does not always immediately appear in list in Folders pane after being selected

Expected results:

Folder should always immediately appear in Folders pane under the account. Instead, it's sometimes necessary to restart Thunderbird. It seems like the filesystem is not scanned for new folders created once Thunderbird has been started, or that information is cached and not updated. I've also tried adding the newly created mbox to ~/mail/.subscriptions, and although thunderbird acknowledges the folder is subscribed, even clicking "refresh" doesn't add it to the folder list in the account pane.

This is fedora 40 with 128.2.0esr (64-bit). Please let me know what I can do to assist with troubleshooting. I also reported this same bug two years ago as Bug 1779006. I don't know that it was ever fixed in that time; only now do I need this capability again.

The IMAP server is dovecot-2.3.21-6.fc40.x86_64 on fedora40. I don't see any specific error messages or debugging messages that could be related.

Hardware: Unspecified → x86_64
Version: Thunderbird 91 → Thunderbird 128

Is there an update on this? Has it been confirmed?

The folder gets added to the folder pane when the Subscribe panel is dismissed with "OK".

There are a few things unclear in your report:

  1. What is "Create new mbox folder outside of thunderbird" meant to do? You can add mbox files manually as local folder or a folder included in a POP account. Since IMAP get messages from the server, there is no point in creating an mbox file.
  2. What is ~/mail/.subscriptions? I've never heard of this.

Bug 1779006 was closed as incomplete ("missing information") and there is also bug 1891687. Interesting reading in bug 1891687 comment 4.

See Also: → 1891687, 1779006

There is an external process that creates an mbox based on different criteria. The mbox filename is typically created based on the date. Unless I restart thunderbird after the mbox is created, it's unable to identify it on the filesystem and make it available for reading.

The ~/mail/.subscriptions file is the subscribed list of folders that Thunderbird displays in the folder pane.

What is the purpose of the "Refresh" button in the folder selection pop-up? Does it not request a new folder list from the imap server?

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