526060 - Inconsistent behavior when dragging folders to Imap account

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[William Babb]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/20091016 Firefox/3.5.4 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.23

When dragging a folder or group of folders from "Local Folders" (Old Pop3 structure) to new Imap account, I noticed that only some folders would move. For example, I dragged the "Hobbies" folder group to "Personal" in Imap and only some of the first few folders got moved. Several subfolders and parts of structures were not moved and cannot be moved manually. Attempts to move them result in no action. No messages are produced. Oddly enough, some of the folders that could not be moved to the "Woodworking" group COULD be moved to another unrelated group. Case in point, I was able to copy the "American Woodworker" folder to one called "IBM QCC" in Imap but could not copy it to the "Subscriptions" folder in another unrelated folder.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Select a "Local Folder"
2.Drag it to where it belongs in the Imap account.
3.
Actual Results:  
Some folders move/copy but others don't.

Expected Results:  
Selected folder and messages should appear under the target folder.

This is pretty basic stuff and something I have done many times before but suddenly it stopped working about mid-October. I don't recall any maintenance happening to TB. I thought I might have hit some kind of limit but no messages appeared to say so. The inconsistency of it blows my mind.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

can you reproduce this in version 3?

Comment 2

[William Babb]

Frankly, I didn't know there was a version 3 until now. I may try that but I've also discovered that Gmail mirrors the folders I create in TB. Apparently, Gmail has some limitations on the folder structure that prevents it from accurately replicating a complex structure. If the folder names are long and the folder structure is multi-level you soon bump into the length limitation that Google imposes on what it calls "labels." Lately, I've received some error messages to that effect. This is new. Never before did I ever get any kind of error message. The bottom line, I guess, is the problem, if there is one, belongs to Google Gmail. I never noticed this happening before I changed from POP3 to IMAP. Not sure why that is. One would think there is a need for better communication between email client developers and their counterparts in the host world.

Comment 3

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

There are several kinds of known issues around "Drag&Drop of local mail folder to IMAP account/folder".
(1) As you are always aware of it, Gmail's label length has limit of max 40bytes. So, deeply nested local mail folder can't be copied to Gmail IMAP server. (bug 507553)
(2) If IMAP server uses "." for folder hiearchy delimiter, "drag and drop of local mail folder which has subfolders to IMAP account/folder" produces problem.
If you use Gmail IMAP only, I think this issue is irrelevant to your problem. However, if you have "/" in local mail folder name, similar problem may happen with IMAP server uses "/" for folder hiearchy delimiter.
(3) Drog&Drop of folder between accounts fails in midstream silently. This is applicable to Gmail IMAP too.

Dup of bug 507553?

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to last question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond with your reasons why.

Comment 5

[William Babb]

Ok to close it. I think the problem is Gmail's. Sorry for the late response. Email volume overload. I haven't made it this far down the list for nearly a month.