331970 - IMAP: non-inbox \Recent messages improperly shown in bold just like \Unread messages

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Tony Hansen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

In a recent release, something changed in how messages are highlighted in IMAP. In past releases, unread messages were shown in bold. This was evidently recently changed to also enbolden messages with the \Recent flag set. This was making me go bonkers until I realized what was going on. In particular, I'd read a message, then file it under a separate folder. Later on I'd visit that folder, and I'd see all these messages in bold. Since I move both read and unread messages across to other folders, I'd then go through the list in that folder all over again and try to figure out which ones I *had* read and which ones I hadn't. Yikes. Then one day I switched to another folder and back again, and suddenly those bold highlightes had gone away, leaving only the messages highlighted that were truly unread. So now my workaround for this bug is to switch to the folder I want to look at, switch to a different folder, then back to the folder I really wanted to look at, and *then* I see the highlighting I expect.

Now, enboldening \Recent messages works fine in the Inbox most of the time because the two are almost always the same list. The only time this isn't true is when you have two imap connections to the inbox.

My suggestion to fix this is to do one of the following:

1) choose another way of indicating Recentness (italics? color?), or

2) treat non-inbox as different from inbox for what is enboldened, or

3) add an option that lets the user choose how \Recent messages are handled.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. using imap, read message in inbox
2. move message to another folder
3. switch to that other folder, note that the message is shown in bold

Actual Results:  
The message is shown in bold just like unread messages. 

Expected Results:  
Since the message is read, it should not be shown the same way as unread messages.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

We don't do anything special with the /RECENT flag, afaik, so I don't know that this really has to do with the /RECENT flag. 

an imap protocol log might help:

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

Comment 2

[Tony Hansen]

Ok, so that theory is blown. Looking at the log, I see these commands:

4 UID fetch 1:* (FLAGS)
5 UID fetch 1058678348:1059456415 (UID RFC822.SIZE FLAGS BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (From To Cc Subject Date Message-ID Priority X-Priority References Newsgroups In-Reply-To Content-Type)])

The output from the command #4 is a set of lines like this:

* 1 FETCH (UID 964007940 FLAGS (\Seen))

The output from the command #5 is a set of lines like this:

* 2968 FETCH (UID 1058678348 RFC822.SIZE 6186 BODY[HEADER.FIELDS ("From" "To" "Cc" "Subject" "Date" "Message-ID" "Priority" "X-Priority" "References" "Newsgroups" "In-Reply-To" "Content-Type")] {503}
...
  FLAGS (\Recent \Seen))

Emperically, it appears that the messages that are being enboldened are those that were returned in this second fetch, in other words those that were not in the cache before.

If this is the case, this is wrong. The only ones that should be enboldened are those that do *not* have \Seen set.

Comment 3

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Reporter, does this issue still occur in the latest supported 2.0.0.x / Shredder trunk nightlies?

(1.5.0.x is now end-of-life, and the latest supported 2.0.0.x is 2.0.0.16)

Comment 4

[Tony Hansen]

I'm running 2.0.0.16. The problem seems to be intermittent.

Open your inbox. Read a message. Drag it to another folder. Open that folder. Look for the message you just dropped in. Sometime it shows up with the unread flag set, and sometimes not.

Comment 5

[shattered]

Still a problem in version 2.0.0.23 (20091102), IMAP server is Exchange 2010.

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Still a problem in version 2.0.0.23 (20091102), IMAP server is Exchange 2010.

The 2.0.0.x series is no longer supported (and .23 is not the latest version anyway). You should consider upgrading to 3.1.x.

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Still see this issue when using a current version?

Comment 8

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard