547493 - Archived messages article is unclear, wrong, or documents a surprising design decision: "automatic" monthly archiving on by default

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(support.mozillamessaging.com Graveyard :: Knowledge Base Articles, defect)

Description

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

The second-to-last paragraph of http://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/Archived+messages states that Thunderbird by default archives messages monthly to "prevent mail data files from becoming so large that they are unwieldy", among other reasons. The article implies that this uses the same mechanism as manual archiving, going so far as to state that the mail.server.default.archive_granularity setting controls granularity for both features. (It doesn't mention the ability for accounts to override this in prefs, but that's a separate bug I may file sometime.)

In addition, the following path pattern is given:
Thunderbird/Profiles/<profile_name>/<mail_account>/Archives/2009/2009-01
On my system, this does not match any actual files; there are no Archive folders there. The closest thing is
Thunderbird\Profiles\<profile_name>\ImapMail\<mail_account>\INBOX.sbd\Archives-1.sbd\2009.mozmsgs\
which contains, at present, exactly one message of 3 KiB.
Looking in my folder tree, all the inboxes I spot-checked have messages considerably older than one month, and most have messages more than a year old. Several have no existing Archives folder at all.

I *believe* that this indicates that the article is wrong. At any rate it is certainly unclear, and if there is in fact an automatic archive feature, should go into more detail on it and (quite possibly) give some justification for its proper use.

(This bug was spun off the discussion in bug 542998, which discusses the ability to disable either automatic archiving [if such a thing exists] or manual archiving -- it is not yet clear which. Setting blocking to signify this, as fixing this bug will hopefully clarify that one.)

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

That article is wrong and needs to be corrected. If bug 542998 succeeds to provide a disable option, the article would have to be amended respectively, thus reversing the dependency.

Comment 2

[Jeff Mann]

the article has been revised, but still contains misinformation. the last paragraph still talks about "frequency of archiving" and how to "disable automatic archiving".

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

Yes, this yet has to be rephrased, still sounds like "automatic archiving":

> The frequency of the archiving is based on the mail.server.default.archive_granularity setting,
> which is set to "1" (yearly) by default. To use just a single folder, set the
> value to "0". To enable monthly archiving, change the value to "2".

> The *granularity* of the archiving is based on the mail.server.default.archive_granularity setting,
> which is set to "1" *(per year)* by default. To use just a single folder, set the
> value to "0". To *archive by month*, change the value to "2".

If anybody knows a more intuitive word for "granularity", just replace it in the first sentence.

Comment 4

[rsx11m]

This article is still wrong. While you are there, maybe also add documentation for the new mail.server.default.archive_keep_folder_structure preference (3.1) introduced in bug 522761.

Comment 5

[Roland Tanglao needinfo please :rolandtanglao, :mohnkuchen, :adobo, :sinigang, :roland]

jen and rsx11m is this article now up to date? please fix it if isn't. rsx11m feel free to edit KB articles yourself as well?

Comment 6

[rsx11m]

The history of that article indicates that the last change was made April 21, thus well before my comment #4. Also, the profile path lacks the Mail/ImapMail level (is partial anyway and may be unsuitable for that article level anyway).
I don't intend to enter yet another venue, especially since you likely want to maintain a preferred style and level of detail for you KB articles.

Comment 7

[jenzed]

I removed the section that describes tweaking settings via the Config Editor (because that is, by policy, not appropriate for the KB); also removed paragraph describing the disk location of archive (account settings should be sufficient)