Open Bug 500762 Opened 15 years ago Updated 4 months ago

Marking parent folder read should also mark subfolders

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Folder and Message Lists
Type:
enhancement

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: g_winkelmann, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [wontfix?]) 

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042700 SUSE/3.0.10-1.1 Firefox/3.0.10
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.21

I found many articles and bug comments about 'marking unread'. There I have the same problem. But I see the problem as a general problem. I have _many emails and so I sort by folders strictly. But archiving or creating virtual folders need _much_ time to mark. Why do not get all subfolders marked by marking the parent folder?!

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Generate virtual folder
2. include folders
3.
Actual Results:  
see above

Expected Results:  
see above

see above
Version: unspecified → 2.0
Component: General → Folder and Message Lists
QA Contact: general → folders-message-lists
Might be more of an extension fodder.
Summary: Tree n dialogs: Marking parent folder doesn't mark subfolders → Marking parent folder read should also mark subfolders
OS: Linux → All
Hardware: x86 → All
Version: 2.0 → 3.0
I to would like to have the option, when marking a folder read, then have the option to also marka all subfolders.
(evolution has this)
@1: A lot of people consider it counter-intuitive for "mark as read" to not operate recursively.

In fact, for RSS support, this makes folders more or less useless for me.
I agree with comment 1, especially since it's easy enough to mark a folder and its subfolders as read: just select all of the folders in question and click "Mark Folders Read" from the context menu.

I'll leave this open for a bit to get other people's opinions, but unless there's a compelling reason why the above isn't good enough, I think this will be WONTFIXed.
Whiteboard: [wontfix?]
Sorry, this is not entirely true. When you have a very complex and nested folder structure, selecting some 30 folders is not the less time-consuming thing in the world.
Being in the same situation (several nested folders that I need to mark as read), I'd still prefer to have a separate command to mark all subfolders as read, distinct from the current "Mark as read" (which shouldn't be recursive).
(In reply to Simone Lando from comment #7)
> Sorry, this is not entirely true. When you have a very complex and nested
> folder structure, selecting some 30 folders is not the less time-consuming
> thing in the world.

I think that's a case where an extension would be most appropriate. If it turned out that a great many people were using this hypothetical extension, it could be merged into Thunderbird, but I don't think we should add features that would only be used by an extreme minority of users.

Blake, what are your opinions on this?
There's already one, but it's not keeping up with the rapid release cycle...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/marksubfolders/

BTW, if behavior for "Mark as read" is going to change you'll need a different label, since locales can have reference to a single folder (that's the case of Italian).
I just migrated 13 years of business email from Eudora to Thunderbird, which included a very large and complicated nested set of folders that reflected the projects I've worked on over the years. I was frustrated that Thunderbird seemed to mark many random messages as being unread in many of the folders. When I tried to fix that problem I ran into this bug, and I had to visit each and every folder and sub-folder by hand. This is not a good first experience for users migrating from Eudora to Thunderbird.

Recursively applying the "Mark all messages as read" command to sub-folders seems like the natural thing to do, and follows the user interface design Principle of Least Astonishment.

For the sake of future users migrating to Thunderbird, I would like to add my voice to those requesting that this bug be fixed in the core of Thunderbird (and not via an extension).
Work-around:
Mark all folders in question with Shift-click, 
then right-click and "Mark as read"
Geir, that work-around doesn't solve the problem of forcing you to visit each sub-folder by hand. It only applies the "Mark as read" to folders at that level. You still have to do that to every folder that contains message folders. If they are deeply nested the process is onerous.
I completely agree with Paton Lewis when he writes "applying the "Mark all messages as read" command to sub-folders seems like the natural thing to do". Whether as an extension or as an integral part of Thunderbird, this feature is badly needed especially since the add-on that nicely did the job no longer works.
Another vote for "mark all folders read" to work the way we expect ... i.e. recursively.  It's totally tedious having to open zillions of folders just to mark them read.  This has got to be a key usability fix for Thunderbird ... I for one waste time every day working around it.  In fact this deficiency makes the automatic highlighting of unread messages less than meaningful.     Please fix ... there will be a huge round of applause !
Yet one more vote for "mark all subfolders read" recursively. I have a complex sub folder tree with over 10 years of messages. I just encountered a glitch that resulted in many folders at different locations in the directory tree marked as unread. Very tedious job to have to go down and select all the folders, even in groups, to mark them back to read status.

Please fix this!
I also request this (and have seen the bug tmall mentioned.)
Just noticed this problem was identified 9 years ago and is still unassigned...gosh!

Bump. This affects everyone trying to migrate to Thunderbird.

Looks like it'll be fixed https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/63.0beta/releasenotes/ as soon as 63.0 is released.

Looks like the new feature marks all emails in all folders as read - which is a bit of a nuclear option.
I have 20 or so top-level folders - each of those has numerous subfolders, nested up to 3 layers deep.
For a decade, I have been looking for a feature in Thunderbird that will let me select a folder at any level, and right click it and say "mark subfolders read". The extension worked for a while, then I had to hack on it to get it to work - it sort of works, but struggles when there are a lot of items to mark read. Now with the latest Thunderbird upgrade to 68.4.1, the extension is broken again.
Can we PLEASE get this feature?

Just realized that this "issue" is open for over 12 years. Using TB 78 and still no possibility to mark a parent folder and all it's subfolders as read. The nuclear approach leads in my case to TB working for minutes under full load meanwhile not being responsive at all. Please consider adding this feature to TB, so that a folder and all its subfolders can be marked as read without marking all other mails in the mailbox as read as well. This would allow much more surgical approach :-)

+1 for mark all read recursively. Is this ever going to get looked at? 13 years later, came on.

Severity: normal → S3

+1 for mark all subfolders read recursively. This is a UI fail. I collapse folders to save vertical space. I have to uncollapse them, mark the folders separately, then collapse them again OR not use subfolders to structure information.

Name Thunderbird
Version 91.11.0
Build ID 20220628000715

My situation is the same of LeeAnn and the "workaround" is very uncomfortable and time-wasting. I withstand with the old marksubfolders extension as long as I could, but it is not possible to get it to work with the recent versions of thunderbird. It was an heavy hindrance for me in updating thunderbird.
Please add this feature (a new voice in the menu should note be so heavy for the UI), or add a preference in about:config so that advanced users can decide how "mark the folder as read" works, or add this feature with a new extension (but, please, an extension managed by mozilla staff that will work in the future and will grant a stable feature for thunderbird).

I've been holding off upgrading TB for ages because I had the MarkSubfoldersRead Add-on.

as I recall, the last time I went to upgrade, I rolled the upgrade back because not being able to bulk mark as read for subfolders was a pain. Mail filters into the subfolders. Sometimes I just want to mark them all read. And I couldn't.

Well, I finally upgraded TB again. And again I lose the add-on. And again it's really really irritating to not be able to mark subfolders as read.

I mean, it's such an obvious function.

See Also: → 519687
Duplicate of this bug: 1577761

Have given up on Thunderbird ever implementing this - and have requested this feature at Betterbird!
If you are still waiting on this, please check out this enhancement request and let's see if we can get it happening -

https://github.com/Betterbird/thunderbird-patches/issues/211

This is not a pointless feature! If, let's say, you had 20 servers as subfolders and no issues arose, you can also mark all of them as read at once, a bit of admin from hell ;-)

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