230887 - Impossible to access folders Inbox/* because Mail/ of Mail/Inbox is stripped off by sub-directory handling

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031107 Galeon/1.3.11a (Debian package 1.3.11a-1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla 1.5 Win32 version, official mozilla.org build. Also happens with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031107 Debian/1.4-2 StumbleUpon/1.75

If a user has a Mail folder (of the kind that contains other folders) called
"Inbox" in his root, then he cannot access folders in this folder, because
Mozilla tries to access them as subfolders of "INBOX". The folder being called
"Inbox", not "INBOX", this fails. The subfolders are listed in the hierarchy as
subfolders of the special folder "INBOX" (which, in itself, is a debatable
choice: what if the user has both Inbox and inbox (and even iNBoX)?), but cannot
be selected; an popup shows the response of the IMAP server (along the lines of
"No such folder INBOX/foo").

I'm using UW-imapd version 2001a (Debian woody).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. ssh to IMAP host
2. mkdir Mail/Inbox/
3. put some mail in Mail/Inbox/foo
4. exit
5. configure Mozilla to access that IMAP account
   configure $HOME/Mail/ to be the top-level of the Mail hierarchy
6. Push the "+" at he left of the Inbox
7. Click on "foo"
Actual Results:  
A pop-up says "The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded:
SELECT failed: Can't open mailbox Mail/INBOX/foo". That's because Mozilla asks
the IMAP server to select the INBOX/foo folder, instead of Mail/Inbox/foo.

Expected Results:  
Selected the Mail/Inbox/foo folder.

This is essentially bug #90683, but the latter was wrongfully closed, because
misunderstood, and I have no means to re-open it. It is assigned to someone who
isn't working on Mozilla anymore (that's how I understand the "(gone)" in the
name, at least), so adding a comment to it is basically talking to the
bit-bucket, as examplified by my more-than-year-old comment.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

please update to 1.6 - I believe this is fixed in 1.6

Comment 2

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

No, it isn't. I just tried with
 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031210
downloaded from
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.6b/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-full-installer-1.6b.tar.gz
and the problem is still present.

I also tried
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/nightly/latest-trunk/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz
(timestamped  13-Jan-2004 17:29 ). Same result.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

what have you set as the online mail directory in Mozilla? "Mail"? "~/Mail"

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

also, could you attach an imap protocol log by following these instructions?

http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html#imap

Comment 5

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

Attachment: IMAP protocol log

Comment 6

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

I have set the online mail directory to "Mail/"

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

OK, I know what's happening - the imap code that gets told about Mail/Inbox has
already had Mail/ stripped off, because the online sub-directory handling
happens at a lower level. So, it looks like just the INBOX to us, and we
upper-case it because the INBOX is case-insensitive in IMAP. In order to fix
this, I'll need to somehow communicate to that code that there's an online
sub-directory pre-pended to this INBOX and not upper-case it in that case.

With my test imap server, this happens to work because mail/INBOX/a is treated
the same as mail/Inbox/a.

But the bigger question is, do you expect to have two inboxes, INBOX and Inbox,
or just one? When I do this, I only see the one Inbox.

Comment 8

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

> In order to fix this, I'll need to somehow communicate to that code that
there's an online sub-directory pre-pended to this INBOX and not upper-case it
in that case.

This doesn't look like a clean solution to me. Let's suppose now that I have
*no* "Mail directory", and an "Inbox" folder directly in my root. Wouldn't this
bug re-appear in this case, even with your proposed fix? (Maybe this case is
forbidden by the IMAP specification, and we're done)

What about not uppercasing inbox, ever? Just using the folder names exactly as
the server gives them? Much simpler solution. But maybe I'm missing a subtelty
that requires inbox to be upper-cased.

> But the bigger question is, do you expect to have two inboxes, INBOX and
Inbox, or just one? When I do this, I only see the one Inbox.

Never mind what I expect, please implement what will *work*. What if I have both
Mail/Inbox/foo and Mail/InBoX/foo ? I feel you can't handle this case sanely
while still "collapsing" Mail/Inbox (where inbox is of some case) to the same as
the special folder INBOX in the UI. For your information, I'd expect them to be
different, one the special INBOX folder (of the kind that contains mail), the
other an Inbox folder (of the kind that contains folders). After all, one is
/var/mail/username and the other is $HOME/Mail/Inbox/ . But maybe this
expectation is because I'm such an Unix nerd. Maybe Mac/Windows users will
expect it the other way round. Because of the problem I mentioned, I feel the
only sane thing to do is to explain to these users that these two are really two
different folders, that INBOX is a special case, etc. (Beyond this problem,
collapsing INBOX and $MAIL_PREFIX/Inbox/ would also call for a *lot* of
special-casing, thus a lot of (potential) bugs. For example, when someone asks
for creation (through the mozilla UI) of a subfolder of INBOX, you'd have to map
it to $MAIL_PREFIX/Inbox/subfolder, silently create $MAIL_PREFIX/Inbox (or inbox
or INBOX or iNboX or ...), etc.) And it would be confusing for users: Why can my
INBOX, which contains mail, contain subfolders, but no other folder containing
mail can contain subfolders?
Be easy on yourself. Don't collapse INBOX with $MAIL_PREFIX/Inbox . Ever.

Comment 9

[David :Bienvenu]

>This doesn't look like a clean solution to me. Let's suppose now that I have
>*no* "Mail directory", and an "Inbox" folder directly in my root. Wouldn't this
>bug re-appear in this case, even with your proposed fix? (Maybe this case is
>forbidden by the IMAP specification, and we're done)

Yes, it's forbidden by the IMAP specification - INBOX, Inbox, InBoX, etc, are
all equivalent at the top level, and you can only have one. The bug is in the
way Mozilla handles the online directory - it strips it off completely so that
we think Mail/Inbox *is* the top-level Inbox. That's what needs to get fixed. If
we didn't think that was the top level INBOX, we wouldn't upper-case it and part
of the problem would be solved.

I believe that Mail/Inbox should be different from the top-level INBOX, and that
they are different in the eyes of the server (that's really the crucial question
- it doesn't matter what you or I think - the question is if those are two
different folders on the server, and I believe they are). That will require a
separate fix in the code.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #9)
> >This doesn't look like a clean solution to me. Let's suppose now that I have
> >*no* "Mail directory", and an "Inbox" folder directly in my root. Wouldn't this
> >bug re-appear in this case, even with your proposed fix? (Maybe this case is
> >forbidden by the IMAP specification, and we're done)
> 
> Yes, it's forbidden by the IMAP specification - INBOX, Inbox, InBoX, etc, are
> all equivalent at the top level, and you can only have one. The bug is in the
> way Mozilla handles the online directory - it strips it off completely so that
> we think Mail/Inbox *is* the top-level Inbox. That's what needs to get fixed. If
> we didn't think that was the top level INBOX, we wouldn't upper-case it and part
> of the problem would be solved.
> 
> I believe that Mail/Inbox should be different from the top-level INBOX, and that
> they are different in the eyes of the server (that's really the crucial question
> - it doesn't matter what you or I think - the question is if those are two
> different folders on the server, and I believe they are). That will require a
> separate fix in the code.

Have we gotten past this?

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

preemptively setting in-testsuite?