544740 - new IMAP account set to synchronize all messages for offline storage

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Account Configuration, defect)

Description

[Cédric "chewey" Menge]

After creating a new IMAP account in Mailnews, the first thing that happens is that Mailnews downloads everything (whole message bodies, not just headers) to its local cache. This is a rather bad default, especially for clients on low storage-capacity hardware (netbooks, smartphones) in conjunction with very large mailboxes and/or low-bandwidth connections.

This is caused by the "Synchronization & Storage" setting "Keep messages for this accounts on this computer" being set by default.

Found in (at least) SM 2.0.2 on Win/Lin/Mac

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

Yes, that was mainly driven by Thunderbird for their 3.0 version, also related
to the TB Gloda search backend (which works on synchronized IMAP data only for full-message searches). As can be seen from the (not always quite civilized) discussion in bug 505759, a rather disputed decision their as well.

A couple of bugs are pending to restrict IMAP synchronization by various parameters (limit space = bug 511118, download rate = bug 506024, skip any attachments = bug 508276) and it can already be restricted by message age,
but the default apparently is intended to remain "all" for new and migrated accounts. Since the IMAP backend and some account manager functionality is
shared MailNews Core code, changes in Thunderbird equally affect SeaMonkey.
I'm not sure to which extent initialization and migration code can differ between those two applications.

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

Read also bug 505759 and bug 541209 for Tb3, please.

Comment 3

[Cédric "chewey" Menge]

Oh my, a hornets' nest...

While I agree with the consensus reached in bug 505759 (add a possibility to keep existing settings on profile migration), this bug is a separate issue:

 - It's about SeaMonkey
 - It's about new accounts, not migrating existing ones

I've talked to Mnyromyr about it, and the fix probably should be in form of an option in the "new account" wizard.

Comment 4

[rsx11m]

Yes, the scope here is a bit different, but the underlying problem similar.
I've adjusted the summary, "cache" and "offline storage" are different things.

Comment 5

[mattk]

Just checked the following on SM 2.0.3:

Verified in about:config that mail.server.default.autosync_offline_stores is set to "false".

Created a new imap account.
Logged into the account.

Went to mail and newsgroup account settings and there to "synchronisation and storage": "Keep messages for this accounts on this computer" is still set by default.

Checked the Imap-mailfolder in the profile: 100 MB of Mail have been downloaded already.

mail.server.default.autosync_offline_stores = "false" is obviously ignored.