264015 - IMAP quota alerting causes serious usability issues

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 247193

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, defect)

Description

[Mike Brodbelt]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040413 Debian/1.6-5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040413 Debian/1.6-5

Using Mozilla (or Thunderbird) to access a mailbox residing on a Cyrus IMAP
server with quota enabled can cause user problems. Cyrus has a quota, and a
warning threshold, which is set by default to 85% of the total quota. So, if a
user has a 100Mb quota, when they reach > 85Mb of mail, Cyrus will start sending
quota warnings. It does this by using the IMAP ALERT keyword, and pretty much
every IMAP operation by that user gets an IMAP ALERT tagged onto the protocol
exchange.

All this is OK until the user takes an action that results in a number of IMAP
protocol operations. To give a specific example if Mozilla polls all folders
(admittedly this example is slightly outdated with IDLE support, but there are
others), an ALERT gets generated for every folder on the system. If a user has
50 folders (not uncommon), Mozilla then sequentially generates 50 *modal* dialog
boxes that the user is forced to dismiss before the application is usable again. 

If subsequently, the user selects a block of emails, and deletes them, Mozilla
moves them to the Trash. Each COPY operation to the trash folder produces
another modal dialog. The user can be forced to dismiss literally hundreds of
such dialogs before the application returns to usability, even when they never
reached the actual quota limit. Typically I get a phone call from a distressed
user before they reach this stage.

I have resorted to setting separate quotas on Trash folders, which alleviates,
but does not solve the problem. Using shift-delete can also help a little, but
the fundamental issue remains. Could mozilla not be made to display information
provided by the server via IMAP ALERT in a notification area in the status bar,
in a manner that does *not* require the user to click to dismiss the
notification? Quota messages in particular could be captured and just displayed
in a subtle fuel-gauge type manner. Rendering the entire application
unresponsive behind a stack of modal dialog boxes seems to me to be the worst of
all worlds.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Attempt to use Mozilla Mail with an IMAP account over 85% of quota on a Cyrus
server. Virtually any operation will cause this problem.

Comment 1

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 247193 ***