747894 - Offline needs to be enabled / disabled on per-account basis

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 312619

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, defect)

Description

[Dietmar May]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0
Build ID: 20120312181643

Steps to reproduce:

Currently, T-bird offers only the ability to be online or offline for all accounts, but not for individual ones.

When working in a portable (ie. notebook) environment, Thunderbird may have only occassional access to corporate IMAP servers, but constant access to internet-based POP3 servers (eg. ymail.com, networksolutions.com, etc).

Say someone is working away from the office, and doesn't have VPN access. They've sync'd offline IMAP folders before leaving the office; but still need to check POP3 frequently for new mail while on the road. In such case, downloaded POP3 messages will be stored in local folders and uploaded to IMAP once connected to the corporate IMAP server.

The IMAP server needs to be flagged offline, and T-bird shouldn't attempt to connect; but the POP3 server needs to be flagged online, and T-bird should continue to download mail.


Actual results:

If T-bird is online to allow checking and downloading of new e-mail messages, any attempt to access an offline IMAP server yields "Server timeout" error messages, time after time, for each folder accessed.

To avoid this behavior, it's necessary to set T-bird to offline mode before accessing the offline IMAP folders, then set to online mode to check POP3 e-mail, then set to offline mode to access IMAP folders, then set to online mode to check POP3 e-mail, then set to offline mode to access IMAP ...

That can make it quite painful to use T-bird for more than occassional e-mail use.


Expected results:

File / Offline / Work Offline should have a companion option Select Offline Accounts, which would offer a list of checkboxes next to accounts, each of which would toggle the online / offline status of its respective account.

An online / offline toolbar item could be added which would display a dropdown menu with a toggle item for each account.

Right clicking on an account in the folder tree should provide a Use Offline toggle item in the pop-up menu.

If T-bird is globally online, but an IMAP account is marked offline, then any access to its folders should be treated as if T-bird were offline; if another (POP3 or IMAP) account is marked online, it should honor the global T-bird online setting and (for POP3) download mail as scheduled or (for IMAP) connect to the server to access mail.