Open Bug 517966 Opened 17 years ago Updated 5 months ago

Default to disabled "Show only subscribed folders" - all IMAP folders were "not subscribed" in new account

Categories

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
General
Platform:
Desktop
All
Type:
defect

Tracking

(thunderbird149 affected, thunderbird151 affected)

Status:
ASSIGNED
Tracking Flags:
Tracking Status
thunderbird149 --- affected
thunderbird151 --- affected

People

(Reporter: joe, Assigned: maxe)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug)

Details

Attachments

(2 files)

Bug 517966 - Default to disabled "Show only subscribed folders". r=#thunderbird-reviewers
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Details | Review
D294718.png
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Details
I have rather a number of mail subfolders on my IMAP account, but when I created an account in Thunderbird 3 for the first time, many of the subfolders were not subscribed by default. I have a smattering of my subfolders, but not all of them, though they all show in the File > Subscribe dialog. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090915 Thunderbird/3.0b4
What kind of server are you connecting to ?
Zimbra; specifically, mail.mozilla.org.
do they all show as subscribed in the subscribe dialog, i.e., not just shown but also checked?
No, they're unchecked.
we don't autosubscribe you to folders when you create a new profile, so this is as designed.
You could turn this into an RFE, if there's not already an RFE bug about offering to subscribe you to non-subscribed imap folders on first run of a profile. We used to do this back in the Netscape days but ripped the code out, I believe.
Well, if I had _no_ folders, that'd be fine, but I do have a couple subscribed in Thunderbird. Or is "subscribing" something that's done explicitly in your IMAP account?
I'm not sure I understand the question. Thunderbird automatically subscribes you to folders you create with Thunderbird, as do other clients that use IMAP subscription. You will always be subscribed to your INBOX, generally, and since we probably created Trash, you'd be subscribed to that. Subscription is stored on the IMAP server and shared between clients talking to the server.
Yes, that was the answer to my question. The main reason I was confused was because neither OS X Mail nor Zimbra seem to care about subscription status; they show me all the folders I have in my account no matter what.
you can make TB do that - under account settings | server, advanced, uncheck show only subscribed folders.
That should probably be the default.
I kinda agree w/ comment #11... Subscription of imap folders is somewhat of an unusual feature among mail clients today from what I can tell.
It's a bit of a relic from the days when people ran their own unix imap servers and used subscription to filter out unwanted folders. LSUB can be much faster than LIST, however, especially for users with a lot of folders. Just doing a single LSUB * is much nicer and faster with less round tripes than doing LIST %, LIST %/%, etc, and doing LIST * by default is going to be painful for some users/servers. Granted, those users could always turn on imap subscription, if we turned it off by default, but their initial experience wouldn't be pleasant.
Charles, are you aware whether this is a major issue for enterprise users? Chris, Matt, Eric,are there many reports of this type of complaint in support forums?
Flags: needinfo?(tanstaafl)
(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #14) > Charles, are you aware whether this is a major issue for enterprise users? Not for us at least... I always disable/uncheck the Thunderbird 'Show only subscribed folders' option. Personally, I'd like that config option to be relegated to an about:config option (or maybe just eliminated?) and the default to be to NOT show only subscribed folders... but maybe there are lots of valid use cases for it that I'm just not considering...
Flags: needinfo?(tanstaafl)
@Wayne, a few complaints that folders appear and then disappear but nothing I can put my finger on as to sepecifics at all. @Charles, The most obvious reason for it these days is that Yahoo IMAP accounts have a Y!Conversations folder which is the saved copies of Yahoo Messenger conversations. Relegating the Google All Mail folder to oblivion is also quite a useful attribute, along with the auto created folders for all of your g+ Circles and The silly important folder that is a subset of your inbox. Personally I think that the option should be moved to the subscribed folders dialog and that dialog restricted to the active account. From a discover-ability perspective it would be an improvement and align the subscription and display in the users mind.
@Matt, Yeah, I do have a really old Yahoo account that I still poll and grab mail from, but I never access their system directly (I run my own dovecot IMAP server). I do set up a few GMail accounts, and yeah, the first thing I do is turn off all of their ridiculous built-in labels when I enable IMAP. I wish they had a 'Use GMail in normal IMAP mode' option... ;) I'm curious - what are some modern day real world use cases for enabling 'Show only subscribed folders'? I just don't see the point these days...
Blocks: 201332
OS: Mac OS X → All
Summary: All IMAP folders were not subscribed in new Thunderbird 3b4 account → Default to disabled "Show only subscribed folders" - all IMAP folders were "not subscribed" in new account
Severity: normal → S3

About this concrete feature request to change one default setting, how can we move this issue forward?

Can we agree on the new default and implement it? Is there anything holding it back? (e.g. why shouldn't we do it?)

Background: I also agree that "Show only subscribed folders" should be off by default. I recently had to help several new users (on x86_64) who 'lost' their mailfolders and were scared their email was lost. Luckily I explained it to them and after modifying settings it was 'fine', but they needed to change this setting for every mailaccount they added (which is tedious at best, for all involved parties). They were glad once this setting was turned off.
So, as a good open source citizen, I thought I'd check the bugtracker (to 'fix' it upstream) and found this bugreport / feature request. There are several other reports out there about this issue (similar, but not identical). It seems to me that this is a papercut which we can fix.

Hardware: x86 → Desktop

Honestly, all subfolders I created on my server were subscribed and I assume not subscribed may include some very technical ones for certain providers.

But I get your point regarding poor first user experience and the option to show all folders is buried so deep, that I had to resort to Google to find the correct place. It shouldn't be hidden under Advanced if it really has this level of impact.

If you want to help, you could do some research by checking and listing some examples how other major e-mail clients like traditional Outlook, Apple Mail, our own Thunderbird for Android/K9 Mail handle this.

Also, do you have any idea which IMAP server/e-mail provider that happened with?

Flags: needinfo?(sebastian)

Flipping such an old default with so little votes and CCs needs some careful research, ensuring we do not get any users complaining about 100s of empty folders or other weirdness this way.

It is a big ask, but if you could get to the bottom of why it was created this way, it would be a huge help and if it is FOSS maybe nudge their behaviour.

But thank you so much for bringing this to our attention.

Assignee: nobody → mozilla

After some initial research on my own, I think it is the best course of action to flip the default for new accounts, keep the one for old accounts and move the option out of Advanced.

It seems both modern Apple Mail as well as Outlook display all folders they can find right away and the whole option was designed for bandwidth-constraints that we do no longer have to this extent.

Yet, I still encourage everyone to vote and/or comment who wants to see this happen.

Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Attached image D294718.png —

I built a small patch doing both changes needed, this is how a freshly created IMAP account looks like in the settings now.

I have little doubt that it does what it should do, and I am increasingly more confident that this is the right thing to do.

That is way more visible, so that GUI change would definately also be a win (IMHO). Great work!

I can't remember every seeing very technical or default unsubscribed folders at e-mail providers to be honest, but that might just be me. It's a very good question to ask though. If anyone knows, let us know :-)

As requested, I've tested with 2 cloud e-mail providers (only with Thunderbird) and those e-mail providers' webinterfaces:

  • It appears that the 'subscription state' of a folder is a server side setting and as such is 'synced' between e-mail clients, since it is a feature of the IMAP RFC 9051.
  • The cause in my specific setup for folders not being marked as subscribed, is because I manually added them and synced them with offlineimap. So at least partially, that is a 'me' issue, so let us disregard this.

Fact still is that there are several people talking about it online, several bugreports in this bugtracker etc.. that it still might be good to revisit the 'default setting' and switch it to 'off' by default.

Flags: needinfo?(sebastian)

It looks like we have an entire 23-year old meta bug 201332 to track all the various complaints over the years, I don't think people seeing unwanted folders that they can easily hide is worse default behaviour than it is right now.

Also, we are not changing the behaviour for existing accounts on purpose, but still making the setting more accessible in case anyone wants to flip the switch in either direction.

My 2 cents, let's aim to land it in Daily 152 when that becomes a thing and see what kind of feedback we get and treat no feedback as all is well.

My 2 cents, let's aim to land it in Daily 152 when that becomes a thing and see what kind of feedback we get and treat no feedback as all is well.

I think it would be safer to wait for the 154 cycle on this.
Since we're starting the 153 ESR cycle in May, we try to avoid making these kind of changes so close to the ESR release.
Especially when changing decades old defaults.

Would you be ok with moving the setting out of Advanced earlier? On common screen resolution there is enough space that this will not require scrolling and the other options in Advanced are far more arcane and are required to be used by pretty close to nobody except IMAP server developers.

If we show unsubscribed folders, but don't subscribe to them, won't that just show empty folders, incurring the same fear that folks' email is gone? I don't see how one is better than the other.

(In reply to Eleanor Dicharry from comment #29)

If we show unsubscribed folders, but don't subscribe to them, won't that just show empty folders, incurring the same fear that folks' email is gone? I don't see how one is better than the other.

No, showing only subscribed folders means subscribed folders are the only folders TB displays in your list of folders.

With that option unchecked, it simply shows all folders.

I'm strongly in favor of this UI change and the default state change for new accounts.

One thing though. Please don't just blanket change the state for existing users, I very much dislike when a program I use all the time decides on its own to change something for me without warning, especially something that has a big impact. This has happened to me in the past with TB when after an update TB just blanket changed the state of every single account/folder (dozens of accounts and hundreds of folders) to 'Full Offline Sync', when I had carefully selected only a few certain folders for full offline sync for each account. It was extremely negatively impactful for myself and our entire organization, I was furious, and made a lot of noise on here and got into some pretty nasty discussions.

Would it be difficult to implement a pop-up warning on first run after the update explaining the change, and giving the user a choice to accept the change or not?

I stand by my proposal reflected in my patch, flip the default for new accounts, keep it the same for existing and move the toggle to a more visible place.

I wouldn't bother adding yet another warning box, just properly document it in the right places.

(In reply to Max Emig from comment #31)

I stand by my proposal reflected in my patch, flip the default for new accounts, keep it the same for existing and move the toggle to a more visible place.

I wouldn't bother adding yet another warning box, just properly document it in the right places.

Easiest/best solution to get this implemented.

But I stand by my comment - if anyone ever considers forcing this change on existing users/accounts, doing so without a warning/opt-out is NOT the way to go.

@(In reply to Eleanor Dicharry from comment #29)

If we show unsubscribed folders, but don't subscribe to them, won't that just show empty folders, incurring the same fear that folks' email is gone? I don't see how one is better than the other.

Apologies, but I've read your remark 3 times now and I cannot make sense of it. What you are mentioning, is not how this works.
TL;DR: don't see this as a concern

(In reply to Charles from comment #32)

Easiest/best solution to get this implemented.

But I stand by my comment - if anyone ever considers forcing this change on existing users/accounts, doing so without a warning/opt-out is NOT the way to go.

Good warning, but IMHO misplaced. If I understood correctly, flipping this setting (the default preset) is a change for new mailaccounts and will not change anything for existing ones. So the effected users will be the ones adding a new mailaccount.

Please also note this a mailboxaccount setting (not a folder or general setting).

I do agree that this should be noteworthy for the release notes (not a warning, just an FYI).

Yeah, how these folders were supposed to work is pretty arcane knowledge nowadays.

I am in favour of keeping the mechanic for subscribing/unsubscribing unchanged for now, neither ripping it out nor redesigning is appropriate at this point, imo.

(In reply to Charles from comment #32)

... if anyone ever considers forcing this change on existing users/accounts,
doing so without a warning/opt-out is NOT the way to go.

Good warning, but IMHO misplaced. If I understood correctly, flipping this setting (the default preset) is
a change for new mailaccounts and will not change anything for existing ones.

Maybe you should re-read what I wrote a few more times. I quoted the pertinent part above...

Please also note this a mailboxaccount setting (not a folder or general setting).

I know this, and nothing in my comment could be read or understood to mean otherwise.

I do agree that this should be noteworthy for the release notes (not a warning, just an FYI).

Again, I said the warning should only be implemented if someone got the bright idea to force it on users and EXISTING accounts.

I stand by this admonition.

Again, I said the warning should only be implemented if someone got the bright idea to force it on users and EXISTING accounts.

Indeed, we will not change or flip this preference for existing accounts, that would only create a lot of confusions for users that are used to the current behavior.

Thanks for pointing this out.

(In reply to Max Emig from comment #26)

It looks like we have an entire 23-year old meta bug 201332 to track all the various complaints over the years

I'd really like to see bug 38943 fixed while we're here. It's confusing to have an account preference like this one that only reacts on a restart.

Adding to the mix that other bugs will likely surface. E.g. bug 2000913 is apparently a problem atm if you have lots of folders and not using subscription only.

See Also: → 2000913
Depends on: 2000913, 38943
See Also: 2000913 →

I agree they are potential blockers and need to be dealt with before this can land.

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