893458 - [Email][l10n] E-mail app does not translate folder names that should already be localized on the account or special folder names (gmail, activesync)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 905869

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::E-Mail, enhancement)

Description

[Mila Davydova]

When user changes a language to German and goes to email account folders view, some of the folder titles are not translated to German. 
Gmail account: "Sent Mail", "Starred", "Important" and "All mail" folders are displayed in English
Hotmail account: “Junk” folder is displayed in English

Prerequisites: Have a Gmail or Hotmail account set up on the device

Repro Steps:
1) Update to Leo Build ID: 20130713070207
2) Set device language to German
3) Go to Email app 
4) Select a drawer button 
5) Observe the titles of the account folders

Expected:
All the folder titles are translated to German

Actual:
Some Titles of the email folders are shown in English
Gmail account: "Sent", "Starred", "Important" and "All mail" folders are displayed in English
Hotmail account: “Junk” folder is displayed in English

Environmental  Variables:
Gecko: http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-b2g18/rev/f21152a848da
Gaia: 2e711c1fdd2441bda34703cd7d8d3c0f1cc2c396
Platform Version: 18.1

Notes:
Issue reproduces on gmail and hotmail email accounts
Screenshots are attached

Comment 1

[Mila Davydova]

Attachment: screenshot 1

Comment 2

[Mila Davydova]

Attachment: screenshot 2

Comment 4

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

The folders are shown here (for Gmail) with German names: "Markiert" (Starred), "Wichtig" (Important), "Gesendet" (Sent), "Alle Nachrichten" (All mail).

Moving bug to the E-Mail app.

Comment 5

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

There are a lot of factors that might be coming into play here.  Technically, this is what's going on, all of which is based on what Thunderbird does:

1) We only provide Inbox/Sent/Drafts/Trash/Unsent/Junk/Archives/Local Drafts strings.  We do not provide Starred/Important/All Mail translations.  The latter are gmail specific 

2) We only translate folder strings from english to other languages if we (have a string and) identified the folder's type correctly and the english name is the same as the type name or an acceptable alias.  For example, we will translate 'Junk', 'Bulk Mail', and 'Spam' all to our localized translation for "Junk", but only if the folder type was correct.

3) Our folder type mapping for ActiveSync is very much based on the spec's numeric encodings and does not rely on inferred types.  There appears to be no numeric type for junk used by ActiveSync (or our implementation doesn't know it), so we don't map the junk folder to junk.


The higher level situation is that we are trying to deal with the situation where the user's effective locale is non-English but the IMAP folder names are in English because the IMAP server does not support (or did not support at the time of creation) the IMAP LIST command variants (XLIST/SPECIAL-USE) that would allow the server/clients to properly localize the names to the user's locale while indicating the type of the folder.


In the cases of gmail and ActiveSync, the server already has the capability to use properly localized names for the account's locale, so we are indeed meeting our goals of working with the user's actual locale for these cases, I believe.

If there is a current moztrap case that says we need to be able to completely re-translate all folder names away from a user's account's locale, I believe it to be in error and should be removed.  Any tests of any of our locales related to folder localization should be performed against an IMAP account that was created for that locale / such that any webmail account for that account displays and displayed the locale in question from the time of account creation.


Having said that, I don't want to dismiss implementing an enhancement like that out of hand.  And I do expect more dupes of this bug, or variants where we are dealing with a server that is not capable of pre-localizing its folders where what we do is insufficent.  As such, I think we should leave this bug open until we determine exactly what we want to do here.

A related but different bug would be our detection of special folder types for folder names that are pre-localized by the server.  For example, not detecting a drafts folder.  That's not a major problem yet since our only special folder we deal with is Trash, but it will start to be a real problem once we start saving drafts on the server.

Comment 6

[Chris Kreinbring [:CKreinbring]]

Also occurs in the Croatian language.

Comment 7

[Shilpa Suresh]

This issue also reproduces when language is set to portuges(do brasil), Dutch, Spanish, Russian and Czech.

Comment 8

[Mila Davydova]

This issue also occurs in the Serbian language

Comment 9

[Delphine Lebédel [:delphine - Use needinfo]]

Since this was already and issue and we shipped it on v1.0.1, this will not make it into v1.1

Nominating for koi? as it still is a pretty bug issue, and is important for  a good user experience

Comment 10

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

I'm not sure I agree on this being a big issue yet.  Thus far, it sounds like the problem is that our QA testers are trying to use gmail and hotmail accounts created using an English locale (AKA when they logged into mail.google.com and hotmail.com, the UI was English, and the resulting e-mail account was tied to English) in order to test all localizations.  This does not sound like a realistic scenario for most users.  (And those would would run into it presumably must already understand English, so it wouldn't be a breaking problem.)  If users are creating accounts on a server using a non-English locale, and then encounter non-localized strings when using the account on FxOS with the non-english locale configured, then that does seem like a big issue.

I would definitely be interested in how other e-mail clients *using IMAP* or *using ActiveSync* (in other words, not using provider-specific apps like the gmail app on Android which does not use IMAP) handle the exact accounts being tested.

Comment 11

[Delphine Lebédel [:delphine - Use needinfo]]

Ok asking for more info from Mila about this

Comment 12

[Mila Davydova]

 
(In reply to Andrew Sutherland (:asuth) from comment #10)
 Thank you for pointing me in the right direction on how to test this issue correctly.
I've seen this exact issue happening with all of the languages we tested.
I have re-tested it using the Russian mail.ru account. It is one of the most popular mail accounts in Russia. After configuring this account on the device, all of the account folders appeared translated. 
When I created gmail account on a server using Russian locale, and then configured that account on the device, all of the account folders appeared translated.
I will re-test the rest of the languages, using the same concept.

Comment 17

[Dylan Oliver [:doliver]]

Triage: This bug has been added to the v1.2 backlog but is not blocking release

Comment 18

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

There are 2 steps to addressing this.  I created 2 distinct bugs since this bug was already surprisingly long and in triage meetings I find it's very helpful if the initial comment is able to be an authoritative statement on the problem.

Those bugs are:

bug 905869 - [Email][l10n] Localize XLIST/SPECIAL-USE Starred/Important/All Mail folder names on IMAP, English fall-back on lesser IMAP, ActiveSync servers
bug 905878 - [Email][l10n] Support detecting and localizing standard non-english folder names across multiple locales by building a multilingual database

I am duping this bug to the first of the two, bug 905869 because resolving duplicate seems more correct than resolving invalid.