313006 - IMAP Subfolders get marked as read before actually reading

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Grant Ingersoll]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7

I have several filters setup that copy mailing list messages from my inbox to
subfolders in my IMAP account.  I do not have the filter mark the messages as
read.  The folder which they are copied to shows that it contains new, unread
messages (in other words it is in bold).  When I click on the folder to go read
the messages, it starts to download the headers for the new messages, and in
doing so marks all of the new messages as read.  Because of the high volume of
mail, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish which messages are unread

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Using an IMAP account, create a filter that moves an incoming message to a
subfolder.
2. Have a message come in that will get moved
3. Click on the subfolder (which should show an unread message)

Actual Results:  
All new mail will be marked as read even though you haven't actually read any of it.

Expected Results:  
Leave the messages as unread

Using the standard default theme.  Don't have any extensions installed.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

An imap protocol log would be helpful. Lots of people do this, and don't have
this problem, so I suspect something in your setup and/or server.

http://www.mozilla.org/quality/mailnews/mail-troubleshoot.html#imap

Comment 2

[Ray Booysen]

Could you also please confirm which version of Thunderbird you are using?

Comment 3

[Grant Ingersoll]

Attachment: IMAP Logfile

Here is my logfile as per the directions

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

This looks like a bug in the GroupWise server. Here's what happens:

1. We copy the message from the inbox to the mailing lists folder (that copy is
supposed to maintain the flags the message had when it was copied)
2. We then mark the message as deleted+read in the Inbox.
3. When we download the copied message from the mailing lists folder, it has
been marked read on the server already, I suspect because GroupWise gets
confused when we copy a message and then immediately mark it as read in the
source folder.

You could try talking to your server administrator and find out if there's a
newer version of the groupwise server, perhaps with this bug fixed. 

Comment 5

[Grant Ingersoll]

Can do as suggested.  Can also copy to a local folder instead of an IMAP folder
as a workaround.  However, I used to do the same thing using the Groupwise
client and it did the correct thing, so it seems like it is possible.  Can't it
be marked as deleted but left in the unread state?  And why does my subfolder
show it as having unread entries?  If it is being marked as read, how does the
subfolder know that it has unread entries?  It is when downloading the entries
in the subfolder that the items are being marked as read, not when they are
deleted from the inbox, which seem to be happening separately.  The first takes
place on arrival of the mail, the second when I actually click on the subfolder.

Not sure what the protocol is on reopening this as a bug, so I am going to do
so, since I am not convinced yet. 

Comment 6

[Grant Ingersoll]

Additionally, in the Status Bar, when I click the folder, the "Unread" status
tells me how many unread messages there are, and as the messages are downloaded,
the status goes to 0 so the client must know how many unread messages there are
at some point in time before I download them since it knows which ones to download.

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

1. It's quite likely that the groupwise client doesn't even use IMAP to talk to
the groupwise server.
2. Even if it did use IMAP, you'd hope that it would work around the server bugs :-)
3. We used to leave the deleted messages in the unread state, but that made a
lot of users very unhappy.
4. Re the status bar, that's actually evidence of the problem being on the
server. We expect that the messages we moved will be unread, so we set a pending
unread count on the destination folder, and show that in the ui. Imagine our
surprise when we open the folder and discover the messages are read after all
:-) that's why the unread count goes to 0, as we discover each message is
considered read by the server.

The protocol log clearly shows to me that this is a server problem. #3 above is
what triggers the server problem. 

Comment 8

[Grant Ingersoll]

Ok, but how does Thunderbird know which messages to get if there marked as read?
 There must be some discerning factor to allow Thunderbird to distinguish
between the new messages and the 654 already read messages I have in that very
folder unless it is downloading them all everytime, which it doesn't appear to
be doing

Comment 9

[David :Bienvenu]

Whenever we select a folder, we ask the server for the list of messages in the
folder, and compare that to the list of hdrs in the local db. Then we download
from the server whatever headers we don't have locally, and delete from the
local db whatever headers no longer exist on the server. For the purposes of
that process, we don't care if the message is marked as read or not. There are
plenty of reasons a message on the server that we've never seen before could
already be /SEEN, e.g., another client marked the message read, or a server side
filter did, etc.