46378 - On-the-fly update of IMAP (folders/mails/etc..) via the IDLE IMAP command

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 141369

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

Description

[Henrik Gemal]

The support in Mozilla doesn't seem to be near as good as in Outlook Express. 
That we (you) gotta do something about...:) So here we goes:

If you have both Mozilla and Outlook Express watching the same IMAP account and 
you fx delete/move mails in Mozilla, Outlook Express automaticlly detects these 
changes and updates it's display of the folder.
Could this be done in Mozilla?

The same should be true for folders. (I dont think OE supports on-the-fly folder 
name changes...)

I thought that this was the smart thing about IMAP compared to POP...:) It's 
properly pretty hard to do?

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

The next time you reselect the folder you should be synched up correctly. This
the the way 4.x worked as well.

I'm marking this request as future. we're not going to get to this for beta3. 

Comment 2

[Henrik Gemal]

The folder correctly syncs when reselected. But:
How do you actually handle these notifications from the IMAP server?
Outlook Express seems to have "OnNotify" in the IMAP log 
("http://www.distinct.com/vit32/docs/activex.imap.doc0078.htm")
Does Mozilla use something like this?

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

Looks like OE is using the Idle command

Comment 4

[Jean-Baptiste Biard]

At least, there should be a button / icon / menu item in order to refresh all
folders info & display.

For the moment, it can only be done through the "search mails" function...

Comment 5

[ras_isaiah]

To find out whether new mail has arrived in a subscribed mail folder, I have to
click on it. This is annoying.

To make things worse, upon clicking on the mail folder, some mails that have
been read reappear as unread, whereas others that haven't been read yet appear
as read. This doesn't happen with every mail, but it happens with specific
mails. Once a mail shows this weird behaviour, it always behaves like this. This
is even more annoying than having to manually check for new mail! Something is
really broken here and it seems to be broken for a long time.

here's my system info:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-AT; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

Comment 6

[Michael Burger]

I am not finding false mails beeing shown as "new" using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;
U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20021220.  But it is really very
annoying, that I cannot see, that a folder has new mails before clicking it.
That's a pan in the a**, if one has many folders.

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

actually, you can do this already with mozilla (this bug should be dup'ed) - if
you bring up the folder properties on an imap folder, just check the checkbox
that says "check this folder for new messages". Then, whenever we check for new
mail, we'll also check the specified folder(s) for new messages as well.

Comment 8

[Michael Burger]

There are two problems with it:
1) It does not seem to work with my Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1;
en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20021220. I have tessted it with a folder, that receives
mail quite frequently (from my servers cron daemon). I checked the mail account
settings also. It should work, but it doesn't. I neither get an alert, when a
new mail arrives, nor the folder view is updated.
2) I cannot mark then INBOX for mail check, only the individual folders I
created under it. All folders appear as subfolders of INBOX, which is not the
way, that it should be, anyway. Up to now, "normal" emails are kept in the INBOX
on the my systems. Only specific mails are moved to other folders, such as
mailing lists, spam, mails from cron daemon and things alike. With the method
you suggest, I could not check the INBOX for new mails, even I it worked, as you
described it.

There is a simle way around it, I think. If you add "check for new mails" to the
INBOX folder also and then add another checkbox to the properties dialog, such
like "check in subfolders also", then it could be done.

But if I had to decide it, I would do it in "reverse logic". If the "check for
new mails" is active in the mail account properties, then by default, all
folders of this account should be checked. Then I would change the "check for
new mails" in every folders properties to "do NOT check for new mails", which
overrides the account setting.

Comment 9

[Henrik Gemal]

David: This bug is not about the "auto check folders" checkbox. Outlook Express
has some other way of checking. It seems to automaticlly detect when there's new
mail. In Mozilla you have to check the folders to detect the new mails.

http://www.distinct.com/products/vit32/docs/activex.imap.doc0095.asp

Outlook express seems to use "OnNotify"

Comment 10

[Michael Burger]

There is a hint, that might be helpful to do the mail check without adding much
new code:

If you right-click the account and select "search Messages" there's a dialog
popping up. I just put a blank into the search string and click "search". This
perfectly updates all folders. I could as well search for "Status is New" or
"Status is not Read", but this is more work for me.

So the basic functions are there obviously. It's just a matter of invoking them.

Comment 11

[Henrik Gemal]

Michael: The thing you describe is already there in the Mozilla code. See
comment #7. This bug is about the way we check for new messages. Mozilla has to
run through all of the folders to check. Outlook Express seems to do it in
another way. If you fx delete a mail in a folder from within Mozilla the mail is
automaticlly deleted from Outlook Express. The server seems to send out some
command. The same is not true the other way around.

Comment 12

[ras_isaiah]

comment #7 works like a charm. Now this is really like Christmas :o) May I
backup Michael's proposal from comment #8 to be able to control this checkbox
for all subscribed folders via a more obvious configuration setting in the main
mail account settings dialog box. And if the user wants special handling for
dedicated folders, that can be achieved via the already present folder
properties settings.

I investigated further into the problem where already read mails are shown as
unread. Those mails are _always_ the last mail in a folder that is made
available for offline access, ie the last mail in the folder that has a dark
grey envelope in the headers display box. Strangely enough, the folder itself is
_not_ configured for offline access! This behaviour shows up only for some of my
subscribed folders, not for all of them.

The folders were subscribed in the days of good ol' Netscape 4.7x and were used
with Mozilla 1.1 and now with Mozilla 1.2. My system info can be found in
comment #5. I can't remember having ever configured those folders for offline
access.

I just synchronized my folders, hoping that the mails in the folders that are
not configured for offline access would be locally deleted, but that didn't help
neither. How do I get rid of locally made available mails? Is there a way to do
this via Mozilla? Can I just delete the appropriate mailfolder file? Or do I
have to adjust the mailfolder.msf file as well?

Comment 13

[Henrik Gemal]

please dont discuss common mail&news questions in the bug reports. Please use
the mail+news newsgroup for these questions.

Comment 14

[David :Bienvenu]

as I said before, my guess is that OE is using the Idle command. It would be
cool to add this to Mozilla but I'm not sure how well that would fit in with our
networking model.

Comment 15

[Michael Burger]

Cannot find an improvement in Gecko/20030312. Not even when starting the program
the mail folders are updated properly. Still have to klick the folder for an
update. At least upon startup, I would expect, that folders are updated.
According to my comment #10 it should not be very hard to do, as the required
code is in the source somewhere already. It's just not executed. Could be
implemented by invoking this code upon startup and then again every 3 to 5
Minutes. There would still be a short delay, but at least it would work.  

Comment 16

[Benedikt Kantus]

*** Bug 220442 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 17

[J Luh]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 141369 ***