594593 - disabling synchronisation between IMAP server and local filesystem is too cumbersome

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[rudy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100819 Iceweasel/3.5.11 (like Firefox/3.5.11)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100805 Icedove/3.0.6

Account where only the inbox is desired to be locally present, and with many subfolders, you have to deselect each and every folder for synchronisation. 

I have a >4G email archive, and i had to go through each subfolder to disable synchronisation for it. When the top-level folder is de-selected for synchronisation, all sub-folders should also be de-selected.

I discovered this unwanted behaviour while working on a 3G modem. TB is my *secondary* email client as it does not contain a good calendaring solution. Thus most email does *not* need to be synced by it. Syncing is simply a waste of disk space in this case. 

Also when creating an account, it is not clear that TB will download *all* folders from a IMAP account when the account is selected for synchronisation. This can be very costly in disk space when the email server contains many GB of email data in archive. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.create IMAP account, with account that has many subfolders in the account
2.select the default setting of synchronisation (not clearly marked it will do this)
3.go and de-select folders for synchronisation
4.notice that when top-folder is de-selected, the sub-folders of this top-folder are NOT de-selected
Actual Results:  
when deselecting a top-folder for synchronisation, the sub-folders remain selected

Expected Results:  
when de-selecting a top-folder, all sub-folders are also de-selected

see above. 

Additional: when de-selecting a previoius selected folder, TB seems to keep downloading. This is costing me $$$$$$$$$ over 3G. 
I've restarted TB, it still seems to download..... looking at traffic.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

So in 3.1 we have an option to disable that completely and then you can choose which folders you want to synch if you want to synch any of them.

Is that less cumbersome ?

Comment 2

[rudy]

It is less cumbersome indeed. (back from trip)