Closed Bug 507335 Opened 15 years ago Closed 14 years ago

alternate smart folder selection properties not saved across restarts / customized smart folders

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Folder and Message Lists
Platform:
x86_64
All
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 532061

People

(Reporter: disposable09, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Whiteboard: [gs]) 

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Firefox/3.5.1 FirePHP/0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Thunderbird/3.0b3

If I unselect a checkbox for an inbox I don't want to see in my overall smart inbox, save it, and restart Thunderbird, all of the sub-inboxes appear again, including the one I unselected.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Right click the top level Inbox smart folder and choose properties
2. Click the Choose button...
3. Unselect one of the inboxes that was selected by default and click ok twice
4. Restart Thunderbird with either CMD+Q or Thunderbird menu > Quit Thunderbird
Actual Results:  
Unselected inboxes from step 3 appeared again after restart

Expected Results:  
The unselected inboxes shouldn't re-appear.

De-selected inboxes stay de-selected for the session. You just can't restart or you loose it.
I can confirm this, same behavior after upgrade from latest stable Thunderbird to Thunderbird 3 RC1.

OS: Mandriva 2010 64bit
I can also confirm this, same behavior after upgrade from Thunderbird 3 beta 4 to Thunderbird 3 RC1.

OS: Windows 7 64bit
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
I can also confirm this behavior on Windows 7 Professional 64bit.
still present in thunderbird 3 RC2
We never intended to let you edit the folders in the smart folder, so one fix would be to simply remove the properties menu item from smart folders. Cc'ing Bryan for his thoughts. Supporting editing of the smart folder scope would run the risk of not automatically updating smart folders when accounts are added or deleted, or special folders changed.
But this option is very usefull, for example I am using several email accounts, all managed with Thunderbird, all using IMAP protocol. Having one Input smart folder integrating all messages from all accounts is nice idea, but...

I am using filters on server to sort incomming messages to several folders. Some of them, for example automated server reports and some mailinglists are not so important and have their own folders. It would be nice to have option to do not display this folders in the Input smart folder.

On the other side, I have some folders with important messages. Current smart folders implementation automatically show only root inbox folder of every email account in "Inbox smart folder", so it would be nice to have an option to add these subfolders to Inbox smartfolder too.

In my opinion, when the editing of smart folder scope is already implemented and works fine (broken is only the loading of saved options as far as I can see), there is no reason to disabling it... if it may cause some confusion when accounts are added or deleted, you could make this options available to switch on in some advanced settings.
(In reply to comment #6)
> We never intended to let you edit the folders in the smart folder, so one fix
> would be to simply remove the properties menu item from smart folders. Cc'ing
> Bryan for his thoughts. Supporting editing of the smart folder scope would run
> the risk of not automatically updating smart folders when accounts are added or
> deleted, or special folders changed.

I think that fix is probably the best way to go forward initially, to at least clear confusion - bug 532061
I fully agree with Pavel Brych: being able to edit the smart folders is a vastly useful feature and actually working fine; except for not retaining it's state. Please, don't just resolve this by disabling the edit function.
Whiteboard: [support]
I fully agree with Pavel as well: I definatelly need this feature. This is the reason why I submited the bug in the first place. It is very anoying to see for example an e-mail account you only need sometimes.
i can confirm this "bug" on TB 3 on Debian Linux (downloaded on Mozilla website), also in the other way (using IMAP protocol and having a not-inbox folder with a filter set at server-level, and wanting messages incoming in that folder to appear in smart inbox).
It works fine, except that the option does not persist by closing and reopening TB.

Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091130 Thunderbird/3.0
Let me add some of my thoughts about this issue.
I't s a long story, but I have to use several mail clients on a specific imap mailbox(thunderbird, outlook, webmail, etc) and each(!) of them stores sent messages in different folders: "Sentbox", "Sent Items" etc, so I want to add them to smart folders, I do this. After that mails apeear in the list, but should I restart Thunderbird, they disappear.
Count me as another vote for fixing the persistence issue rather than disabling access.  I'm getting hit by this from two directions - first, I use subfolders on one of my IMAP inboxes for mail archived and forwarded from a couple of older accounts, and TB's default parse only scans the top-level inbox.  Right now I can a) dump all that mail into the top-level folder and set up filters, which is not an option for organizational reasons, b) go into the properties menu and check those folders manually every time I restart Thunderbird, or c) give up on seeing them in the smart folder view.  So far, (c) is winning out through sheer fatigue.

The second issue is an old account on an unreliable server that I unfortunately still need to keep tabs on from time to time.  The connection times out nine times out of ten, so I don't want it scanned automatically because I get spammed with popups about the timeout.  Trouble is, it's selected for inclusion in the Smart Inbox view by default, and the searcher doesn't respect the individual account settings - it attempts to access that mailbox at startup.  This means that I'm guaranteed a popup about this every time I restart TB, and that I must go in and manually disable it if I don't want to keep getting it every time I manually check for new mail.
(In reply to comment #6)
> We never intended to let you edit the folders in the smart folder, so one fix
> would be to simply remove the properties menu item from smart folders. Cc'ing
> Bryan for his thoughts. Supporting editing of the smart folder scope would run
> the risk of not automatically updating smart folders when accounts are added or
> deleted, or special folders changed.

If this is the case, then I would strongly, strongly, strongly suggest allowing an option to remove the Smartfolder functionality altogether. It's an amusing toy, to me, and mildly useful, but if I'm not supposed to be allowed to control the content of it across multiple IMAP/POP accounts, then I'd rather return to the 2.X functionality and have my Inbox'es entirely separated.
In case it's unclear, the old functionality is still there. Simply click the left and right arrows at the top of the side bar to switch views.

For me though, Smartfolders are amazing. I love the things.
Unfortunately, this issue still persists in Thunderbird 3.0.1. Checking a subfolder, restarting the bird and.. the selection is gone.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; nl; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100111 Lightning/1.0b2pre Thunderbird/3.0.1
In 3.0 TB appeared to be correctly saving user changes to smart folders to the profile virtualFolders.dat file. However the code was not using this file to create the smart folder list on startup.

In the 3.2 alpha code from around Jan 24th TB no longer saves user changes to smart folders. I tried to get the code as of today but it's failing to build to see if that is still true.

I'm a newbie to the code base and I sure there was more to this then just fixing the load method. Shame tho as it didn't look like a million miles away from what we were after.
>However the code was not using this file
Or rather it was using some of the data in this file, just not the list of folders associated with a particular smart folder.
Unfortunately, this bug still exists in the "just released" 3.0.2.
(In reply to comment #24)
> Unfortunately, this bug still exists in the "just released" 3.0.2.

This is planned for a future version and won't appear in a 3.0.x release.

(In reply to comment #22)
> In 3.0 TB appeared to be correctly saving user changes to smart folders to the
> profile virtualFolders.dat file. However the code was not using this file to
> create the smart folder list on startup.

that's correct, these virtual folders are built on startup


getstatisfaction topics:
http://gsfn.us/t/nuzf
http://gsfn.us/t/ob2o
http://gsfn.us/t/oqe4
http://gsfn.us/t/pyww
http://gsfn.us/t/nq1r
Depends on: 532061
OS: Mac OS X → All
Summary: alternate smart folder selection not saved across restarts → alternate smart folder selection properties not saved across restarts / customized smart folders
Whiteboard: [support] → [gs]
(In reply to comment #26)
> This is planned for a future version and won't appear in a 3.0.x release.

I hope we won't have to wait another year for this...


> (In reply to comment #22)
> > In 3.0 TB appeared to be correctly saving user changes to smart folders to the
> > profile virtualFolders.dat file. However the code was not using this file to
> > create the smart folder list on startup.
> 
> that's correct, these virtual folders are built on startup

Then what's the point of saving that data if it's not being used?

Any work around as in extension or something? anyone?
I plan to have a fix for 3.1. 3.1 beta 1 is coming out next week, and we're shooting for a release by June, iirc. There's no workaround...
(In reply to comment #29)
> [...] I plan to have a fix for 3.1. [...]

Will you keep the possibility of choosing which folders to include?
This is in fact extremely useful!
Yes, please see bug 532061, in particular, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=532061#c14 which has a patch that gets us most of the way there.
The work is going on in bug 532061
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 14 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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