273437 - Using folders inside of the inbox causes problems; suggest remove the option to add folders to the inbox

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Eric]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: version 0.8 (20040913)

I have a group of people using Thunderbird, and I've noticed the ones that
complain about crashing have oddly put all of their folders inside of their
inbox. Once I move the folders out of the inbox, they seem to be fine.  The
numbers of folders in their inboxes has varied from 5-20 (not including subfolders).

I find it unnecessary to put folders inside of the inbox anyway, but I'm sure
there are people who disagree.

Notes: When moving a folder out of the inbox, it will sometimes leave a copy of
the folder still in the inbox that has to be deleted manually in the profile.

Before moving folders, I did give these users 0.9 as well, which didn't help. 
Unfortunately, I have not been around when these "crashes" occured to collect
information about it.

Reproducible: Didn't try
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

POP3? or IMAP?

Comment 2

[Eric]

All instances are with pop.  None of the users I have on imap have tried putting
all of their email folders into the inbox.

More info: Crashes/hanging instances would generally happen when the user had
folders and subfolders with large numbers of emails stored in them inside their
inbox, and they were writing lengthy emails.  

Maybe it has something to do with Thunderbird consistently checking every X
amount of minutes for new mails to add to the inbox?  Maybe folders inside of
the inbox causes some kind of refreshing problem?

Is there a good reason to put folders inside of the inbox?  It just seems to be
bad practice to me.  I personally consider the inbox to be incoming only; not
archiving or storage space.  It's like putting your opened postal mail back in
your mailbox outside!

Also, I believe these users were right-clicking on the inbox to create new
folders or had focus on their inbox when they clicked on File>New>New Folder,
which puts them in the inbox (as any other folder on an account).

Comment 3

[Eric]

I just realized that many of these users have an imap account to a different
email address as well as a pop3 account to their personal email addresses on
their profiles.  However, none of them have put folders inside of the inbox of
the imap account.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

The suggestion of disabling folders in Inbox is almost certainly never going to 
be implemented.  More details of the sorts of "problems" encountered -- 
including, oh, say, STEPS TO REPRODUCE -- might be a little more useful.

There are known problems with creating folders that have certain punctuation or 
non-ASCII characters in the names, which seem to be in a constant state of 
almost-fixed.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.