38954 - Automatic notification of unread(new) mail in all IMAP folders

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 18266

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Tony DeJoie]

Microsoft Outlook has a very nice feature that I would hope could be added to
Netscape6. When a 'check for new mail' is performed, all of the IMAP mail
folders are checked.  Eudora almost has this feature, they check all IMAP
folders each time the program is run. Currently Netscape only checks the INBOX
when it is checking for new mail.  Thanks :-)

Comment 1

[lchiang]

I don't understand.  Wouldn't new mail usually go through the Inbox first?  How 
can another folder get new messages (without going through a filter)?

Comment 2

[Tony DeJoie]

Yes, the mail is being filtered into multiple mailboxes. The filtering is being 
done by a program similar to procmail at the time of delivery. Since mail is 
read different ways (locally, remotely) it doesn't lend itself to let the mail 
client do the filtering. As I mentioned above, Outlook actually checks all the 
mailfolders for new mail...

Comment 3

[lchiang]

thanks for the explanation.

Comment 4

[selmer (gone)]

Cool feature for later on...  M20.

Comment 5

[Henrik Gemal]

This bug and 46378 talk a bit about the same thing.

Comment 6

[Len Trigg]

This is a duplicate of bug 18266 (although there's more discussion here than there).

Comment 7

[Jay Levitt]

Bugs 46378 and 18266 are definitely duplicates. (46378 talks mail moved out of 
INBOX by another client, this talks about mail moved by the server, same 
thing.) One of the whole reasons I switched from POP to IMAP was to be able to 
have multiple clients seamlessly sharing the mailbox, so to me this is an 
important enhancement.

I assume only QA should be closing bugs as duplicate.. Lisa?

Also, suggest a new keyword - "OE parity".

Comment 8

[lchiang]

Nope, engineer can mark bugs dup as well.  I'll check the bugs you mentioned.

Comment 9

[C. R. Oldham]

Please note that this does not scale very well.  One thing that kept me from
moving to Outlook for IMAP was that I have about 100 folders.  When I use dialup
to check my mail it took about 20 minutes to check all those folders, and
Outlook us not usable during that time,

I could unsubscribe to some folders but that keeps me from seeing them.  I don't
think the IMAP spec has the ability to designate some folders as "Incoming".

Comment 10

[Jay Levitt]

The slowness problem in Outlook Express (and maybe Outlook as well) appears to 
be that OE drops and re-establishes an IMAP connection for EACH AND EVERY 
folder.  It's one of the stupidest things I've ever seen.  The number of 
folders shouldn't really affect the connection time by more than a few seconds 
in a properly designed client.

Comment 11

[Shawn Neumann]

Please note:  I don't want notification on mail that is filtered to my trash.  I
have some e-mail filters that dump things right away.  I find it annoying that I
get a new mail notification in these cases.  

I understand that checking for new mail in the inbox after filtering would mean
that all the other filtered mail wouldn't show up.  Any thoughts on this?

I think I should register this as a seperate bug, however I thought I would
mention it here.

Comment 12

[Sidney Markowitz]

Note that Netscape 4.x mail client has a simplified form of this that works well
enough when no client with this feature is available:

I also use an IMAP server that sorts mail into folders using procmail for access
by clients on my different machines. It is not practical for me to have every
client I use have identical filters. On linux I use Netscape 4.x. I can select
all the folders that I use for incoming mail then use Update Message Counts in
the File menu.

This is not as good as the automated action of Outlook Express, but it does
allow me to specify just the folders that really are used for incoming mail.

I haven't found any other GUI IMAP clients that deal with this properly.

I think PINE and maybe MUTT do this right, but I haven't gone through the
learning curve of their text based interfaces. I do remember happily discovering
that one or both of them let you specify which folders are for incoming mail and
they very quickly keep the new and read message count displays updated. That is
the perfect imlementation of this feature.

Outlook Express checks all subscribed folders with a separate login to the IMAP
server for each, very slow.

It's been really frustrating waiting for somebody to implement this in a GUI
mail client. It's worse that Mozilla mail doesn't even have the partial
functionality that Netscape 4.x gets from the Update Message Counts menu item.
Perhaps that could be added to an earlier milestone if the right thing can't be
done for a lot longer?

Comment 13

[Sidney Markowitz]

I checked what Pine does with this: It does not quite handle this automatically.
The two deficiencies in Pine's implementation are 1) that you can only have it
tag folders with unread messages in a collection of folders specified by
wildcards in the name. Thus to check all folders that are used for incoming
messages you would have to give all of them names that match, for example,
*.incoming; and 2) Pine has the same problem as Outlook Express and Netscape
Messenger that a separate login is used to check each folder for unread
messages. Does the IMAP spec allow a client to check multiple folders with one
login?

The ideal implementation would be to let the user specify an arbitrary set of
folders as being "incoming" (like Pine already does), provide for that set of
folders to be checked for unread messages (which Pine doesn't allow out of some
misguided concern for the user based on how slow the check could be), and
perform the check of all the folders with a single login to the IMAP server if
the IMAP spec allows that.

Comment 14

[Henrik Gemal]

is this bug related to bug 46378?

Comment 15

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 18266 ***

Comment 16

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Gemal, no, bug 46378 is not the same. This bug is about updating the folder
pane, while the other bug is about updating the thread pane.

Comment 17

[Karen Huang]

Verified as dup.