565457 - IMAP: Should always check all folders for new emails + via select command by default preference (or provide an option to in the UI)

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(MailNews Core :: Networking: IMAP, enhancement)

Description

[dfghjkjhg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; de; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; de; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.4

I have set up an IMAP account and encountered the problem, that mails (incl. body + attachments) are ONLY DOWNLOADED WHEN I OPEN the respective folder (e. g. SENT folder, TRASH folder etc.).

This is very unconvenient. Reasons:

a) Time and Network:
When I haven't opened such a folder for a long time, a huge download starts when I open it. Then it takes a lot of time to download all new messages.
Also my whole network performance is needed for this download.

b) Offline Use:
Also sometimes I have no network connection available. In that case also my e-mails are not available in such folders.
(Okay, I could have downloaded them before manually e. g. via File -> Offline -> Download/Sync Now. But how should I know before that I will not have a network available later ?
And even if I would have known before, then this manual download would also have taken much time. Because then again a huge and time and network consuming download would have started).

So the purpose of this bug report here is to download all messages (header + body + attachment) automatically and immediately as soon as they are available in the IMAP folders (on the mail server) without any user interaction - even without having to open the relevant mail folder in Thunderbird (what in fact would also start a download of all of its messages; but for this I first would have to open that folder manually, what I want to avoid).

Therefore the following two settings should be set by standard as follows:
1.) automatically check for new messages:
    mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new --> TRUE
2.) via the select command:
    mail.imap.use_status_for_biff --> FALSE

==> Or at least provide an option to
    (directly within TB's User Interface: Tools - Options).

(These two settings must be seen in conjunction with:
mail.server.default.autosync_offline_stores --> true
which is already implemented since TB 3.)


Only with these settings all messages would be downloaded in the background immediately without any necessary user interaction (no "work offline"; no "Download/Sync now"; no manual opening of the relevant Thunderbird folder or whatever).

And this "immediate downloading message by message" just takes a short moment and just little network performance and I have always all mail alvailable for offline use IMMEDIATELY (see above: "Reasons" 1. + 2.).


I also know that there are two other bug reports which are supposed to cover the same settings I request here:
* bug 329229 comment 18 really requests just the same settings I request.
  But it has been marked as dup of bug 436615:
* bug 436615 has been marked resolved/fixed.
  But it does not cover 
       ** mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new --> TRUE
       ** mail.imap.use_status_for_biff --> FALSE
  as requested in bug 329229 comment 18 (respectively in my bug report here).

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This isn't going to happen unless 
 mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new --> TRUE
becomes significantly more efficient.

Comment 2

[Kai Mast]

I have an issue related to this I think.

My server has SIEVE filtering set up. I would assume that Thunderbird would refresh the unread message count for all folders, not just INBOX. However, currently this only seems to happen when I restart the application.
As a result, I am frequently missing mail from mailing lists etc...