901287 - Download a single copy of messages with multiple Gmail labels

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Dan Dascalescu]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130618035212

Steps to reproduce:

This is a non-trivial but rather obvious feature request; if there is an existing bug I wasn't able to find, please point me there.

I have a Gmail account with, say, 5GB of messages. Many of them have multiple labels. The problem is that Thunderbird downloads a separate copy for each message, into a folder with that label:

"A copy of a message is stored for each label. That means if you assign two labels to a message and star it using Gmails webmail it has a copy in two folders named after the label, the All Mail folder, and the Starred folder." - http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_Gmail_with_Thunderbird_and_Mozilla_Suite

This may easily result in much more storage required to download an entire inbox, as well as a lot more time on low-bandwith connections.

Since messages are stored in plain text files, I don't see an easy way to store just one copy, then link to it. However, the developers may have better ideas on how to implement this.,

Comment 1

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to Dan Dascalescu from comment #0)
> This is a non-trivial but rather obvious feature request; if there is an
> existing bug I wasn't able to find, please point me there.

Read bug 721316 well first, and see dependency tree for Meta Bug 800003. Your request is perhaps same as bug 697409.
Any way, see dependency tree for Meta bug 402793 before open bug at B.M.O which is relevant to Gmail IMAP, please.

> This may easily result in much more storage required to download an entire
> inbox, as well as a lot more time on low-bandwith connections.

If so, and if you know about Gmail and Gmail IMAP, why you use "auto-sync & offline-use=On" for other than [Gmail]/All Mail, [Gmail]/Trash, [Gmail]/Spam?

> This may easily result in much more storage required to download an entire
> inbox, as well as a lot more time on low-bandwith connections.

After change by bug 721316 and some follow up bugs, when entire mail data of a mail of same X-GM-MSGID is already downloaded to offline-store file, Tb tries to use the mail data in the offline-store file when copy of the mail(mail of same X-GM-MSGID) in [Gmail]/All Mail.

Does "open of this bug" mean that feature by bug 721316 won't work as expected?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

in short, this was done in bug 721316 last fall in version 17.0.x-something

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Dan,

if you install http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/channel/ beta or newer, you will find a column "offline storage location" available which should provide solid indicator of whether you are still getting double+ downloads.

Comment 4

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard

Comment 5

[gene smith]

Reporter Dan,
Do you have any more information on the issue you raised in this bug report? Supposedly Bug 721316 resolved this circa 2012. However, another reporter is asking the same thing in Bug 1554529. I have tested this feature (only download and store a gmail message once even when it has multiple labels) and it doesn't seem to work for me either. I have been maintaining tb IMAP code for a couple years now and didn't know about this special gmail (gimap) feature until recently.