306835 - mail folder hierarchies cannot be moved when IMAP accounts are involved

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Hans Wilmer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-AT; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-AT; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511

Users often store their mail in extensive folder hierarchies on our IMAP server
(cyrus). Every now and then it becomes necessary to move a folder hierarchy from
one IMAP account to another. This isn´t possible. It´s also not possible to move
folder hierarchies from the local folders to an IMAP account, though folder
hierarchies from IMAP accounts can be moved to local folders.

Moving and copying folder hierarchies should work any way round (provided that
the IMAP server in use supports subfolders, of course).


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a folder hierarchy in an IMAP account.
2. Move the folder hierarchy to another IMAP account.
3. Move the folder hierarchy to local folders.
4. Move the folder hierarchy from local folders to an IMAP account.

Actual Results:  
The drag-n-drop operation is denied, as shown by the mouse icon.


Expected Results:  
Moving and copying folder hierarchies should work any way round.


I´ve been searching for some tool to do the job, but I couldn´t find one.


I´m not sure about the Severity (below). I´d say ,A major feature is broken´,
but it may be a Normal bug as well, or could be considered as a feature request :)

Comment 1

[Hans Wilmer]

PS: The same problem comes up when people are migrating to an IMAP server. There
have been postings on the mozilla-mail-news and on the debian-user mailing lists
about the issue, but nobody seems to have a good solution.

Manually recreating a folder hierarchy on the target account to move all the
mail over folder by folder is not exactly an option. In the actual case, that
would be at least about a hundred folders containing almost 1 GB of mail.

Comment 2

[David :Bienvenu]

please try a recent trunk or 1.8 branch build - this has been implemented.

Comment 3

[Hans Wilmer]

Thanks, you guys are great :)

The most recent I could find was Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-AT;
rv:1.8b) Gecko/20050217.

It allows moving folder hierarchies, but it takes utterly long. It pauses for
maybe 10 minutes or so when copying a folder with 10 subfolders, then suddenly
continues for no apparent reason. Then the mouse pointer indicates ´busy´. I can
select folders then, and the status display shows ´downloading message´. This
seems to need some improvement.

I´ll see how far I get with it. Please let me know if I can do some testing or
so to help improving this feature.

Comment 4

[Hans Wilmer]

PS: When clicking on the Commit button to send the above report, the browser
became unable to display any webpages. Finally I closed it with the task manager.

Comment 5

[Hans Wilmer]

It seems to have trouble with subfolders of subfolders. They aren´t copied, but
you can copy them manually from account A to account B to where they should go.
But then, if you click on the manually copied folder in account B, the
mailclient becomes busy and unresponsive.

I can try with Thunderbird or a newer version, just let me know where to find it.

Comment 6

[Hans Wilmer]

Ok, I tried with thunderbird-1.6a1.en-US.win32.zip. It doesn´t become
unresponsive, but behaves very peculiar. After dragging the folder hierarchy to
the folder it should be copied to, TB starts copying mails, creates the first
subfolder and then stops copying. When you click on the subfolder on the source
loaction, copying continues until the next subfolder is created.

Another thing is that sometimes only a part of the mail in a (sub-)folder is
copied, i. e. 10 of 30 or 20 of 50 mails.

My idea was that TB doesn´t correctly scan the folder hierarchy for mail and
stops copying when it thinks that a folder is empty or so. I tried to force it
to read through all folders in the hierarchy by running a body search through
them, but the search didn´t continue after scanning maybe half of the mails.

Finally, I selected all folders of the account as to be made available when
working offline, then started a sync after which TB should switch to offline
mode. It didn´t take long, and TB switched to offline mode, but only a part of
the mails were available offline.

I´ve seen similar behaviour on the Mozilla mailclient when I tried to move a
large number of mails from one folder to another. An unknown number of the mails
were copied or moved, but moving stopped after some time before all the mails
were moved.

Besides, IMAP access is somewhat slow, which is especially noticeable when
moving/copying mail.

Comment 7

[Hans Wilmer]

The Linux version of imapcopy works, see
http://home.arcor.de/armin.diehl/imapcopy/imapcopy.html.

Mozilla and Thunderbird do not work, besides some pearl scripts and a PHP
web-form I tried.

Please test with cyrus, there might be something special to it.

Comment 8

[lenochod]

Can you reproduce with SeaMonkey 1.1.9 ?

Comment 9

[lenochod]

I close this for now as Incomplete.
Reporter, if you still run into this problem while using an recent Build,
please reopen and submit actual information.