688739 - IMAP server not polled for folder list during account creation process

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Erik M Jacobs]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.2
Build ID: 20110906120829

Steps to reproduce:

Open account settings
Add new account
Configure as required (please see bug 353838 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=353838 ).
Hit "advanced"


Actual results:

"Server Settings" dialog only has default "Trash" folder available.


Expected results:

Complete folder list should be available.

Comment 1

[Erik M Jacobs]

The difficulty seems to be that the folder list is not available to Thunderbird until after the account creation is completed and the user actually clicks into the only "Inbox" folder they are presented with.

Steps to reproduce:
Open account settings
Add new account
Configure as required (please see bug 353838 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=353838 ).
Hit "advanced"

At this point the account has been "created" in Thunderbird, and you can see in the window behind the account settings screen that the account and its Inbox exist.

At this point, if you try to go to the "Server Settings" submenu and edit the "When I delete a folder" preference, the only thing that is available in my case is "Trash", the default. My server uses "Deleted Items"

At this point I have to exit the account settings menu and either click on the account itself or right-click on it and bring up the subscribe menu.

It appears that the very first time Thunderbird connects it will create the default "trash" account.

While this particular bug is an RFE, it appears the "bigger" problem is that, when creating IMAP accounts, Thunderbird does not poll for the folder list so that you can choose your alternate folders, regardless of whether or not it auto detects.

Note that bug 242950 talks about automatic detection of these folders. That would be great, but is a "complicated" solution to a simple problem. The "simple" solution could be to just poll the server for the folder list when someone hits the "advanced" button, so that, at that point, they can choose which alternate folder they want for things like sent, deleted, etc.

As of right now, users end up being forced to create a "Trash" folder on their IMAP server which they then need to delete.