297622 - subscribe all/unsubscribe all

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Mikel Ward]

The "Manage Folder Subscriptions" dialog for an IMAP mail account can show
several folders to subscribe to or unsubscribe from.  It's painful to have to
click on each of them.

It would be nice if there were a master check box that toggled all/none.  It
would also be nice if the Control-A shortcut worked in this dialog so I could
select all the folders with the keyboard.

Comment 1

[Chris]

:: one year later ::

I agree with the original poster.  I have a sizeable folder hierarchy on an IMAP server, that changes relatively regularly, and it's very time-consuming to have to recurse through multiple levels of subdirectories and subscribe to each one individually.  It'd be great if there were some sort of way of subscribing to all subfolders.

Comment 2

[Sini Ruohomaa]

In Evolution, I can say I want to see and access *all* my IMAP folders and subfolders (of one account at a time, even, or maybe just in general), independent of whether I subscribe to them or not. This is so much more compatible to a mailbox user, but unfortunately not so synchronous to news users, I figure. Not having this feature makes Thunderbird painful to use when I access my IMAP box from three different machines, creating and deleting folders occasionally. The Evolution access points react immediately without me having to do anything, while the deleted (subscribed) folders remain visible on Thunderbird and the new ones are invisible.

Using Thunderbird version 1.5.0.5 (20060808) from Fedora-based distribution.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

Sini, TB also has the option to show you all folders, not just subscribed folders - account settings | server settings | advanced | uncheck "show only subscribed folders"

Comment 4

[Sini Ruohomaa]

David, thanks for the tip! The "don't bother with subscriptions" completely resolves this sort of problem for me, and I think the vast majority of IMAP users also want to subscribe and remain subscribed to everything on the server - hence, ignore subscriptions totally. I did notice one bug/feature req. where someone wanted to have their junk folder unsubscribed so they wouldn't see the new mail on it, but my perception is that the subscriptionless approach serves the vast majority of users. Hence I'm withdrawing my vote for this bug; the problem is resolved for me.

Now, maybe we could even have the option somewhere more obvious than within the depths of "do you wish to override your server's namespace or do other rather quirky things that require you to understand IMAP in depth?" advanced options... (The eternal problem of how to divide between "normal" and "abnormal" and "of category X" settings in dialogs.)

Comment 5

[Sebastian Schuberth]

I think this feature request should be extended to a more flexible approach that allows to recursively (un)subscribe to any folder hierarchies. Recursively subscribing to the root folder would then in fact subscribe to all folders, which is what the OP requested.

Comment 6

[:aceman]

Yes, this could be useful for large news servers.