276184 - Can't create new subfolders on UW-IMAP anymore

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Phil Kernick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; T312461; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: Thunderbird 1.0 (20041206)

In TB previous to 1.0, right clicking on any mailbox node in the mailbox tree 
had a "create new subfolder" option.  This worked perfectly.

In TB 1.0, this option has been removed, and creating a new mail folder appears 
to be via clicking on the account, and selecting "new folder".

The problem is that this doesn't work with UW-IMAP anymore (creating subfolders 
did work in 0.9).  In the "create as a subfolder of" drop menu, none of the 
mailboxes that contain other mailboxes are listed.  Compare this to every other 
place the IMAP mailboxes are shown, where they do work.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. UW-IMAP mail server.
2. Click the account name, select "new folder..."
3. Try to choose a subfolder from the "create as a subfolder of" menu - you 
can't.

Actual Results:  
You can't select a folder containing other folders.

Expected Results:  
You should be able to.  This is a regression since TB 0.9.

This is not a duplicate of 234010 or 248692, since they existing in earlier 
versions of TB, and this bug is a regression since 0.9.

Comment 1

[Phil Kernick]

Another data point, a solution, and a recommendation.

At some recent point TB handled folder subscription differently than it had 
done before when dealing with an IMAP server that can't store messages and 
folders in the same folder - like UW IMAP.  Certainly it handled it differently 
than Mozilla used to.

The problem was that the server side subscriptions didn't match the client side 
belief about what the subscriptions should be.

On the server side (in the .mailboxlist file) we had this:
Mail/Unix
Mail/Unix/FreeBSD
Mail/Unix/Linux
Mail/Unix/Postfix

In this case the Mail/Unix folder is subscribed, but this is really a directory 
in the underlying filesystem.  Now TB knows that this IMAP server can't store 
both messages and folders in the same folder, so it knows that it isn't 
supposed to be able to create folders under a subscribed folder, so it doesn't 
give the option.

The solution was to manually edit the .mailboxlist file to remove the 
subscriptions to directories (done by Mozilla and an earlier TB), trash the 
client side cache in [PDir]/ImapMail/server.fqdn.org and then restart TB.

Problem solved.

The recommendation:
If TB knows that the server can't do both folders and messages in the same 
folder, and it finds something that conflicts with this in the subscriptions, 
like Mail/Unix and Mail/Unix/FreeBSD both being subscribed, then it should pop 
an alert dialog and fix the problem.