Open Bug 917886 Opened 11 years ago Updated 1 year ago

Unread message count including counts from subfolders is pretty confusing in Unified View, Favorite View etc., rather, wrong display for users

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Folder and Message Lists
Version:
24 Branch
Type:
defect

Tracking

(thunderbird24 affected, thunderbird25 affected, thunderbird26 affected, thunderbird27 affected, thunderbird-esr17 unaffected, thunderbird_esr24 affected)

Tracking Flags:
Tracking Status
thunderbird24 --- affected
thunderbird25 --- affected
thunderbird26 --- affected
thunderbird27 --- affected
thunderbird-esr17 --- unaffected
thunderbird_esr24 --- affected

People

(Reporter: brian, Assigned: aceman, NeedInfo)

References

Details

(Keywords: regression)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release) Build ID: 20130910160258 Steps to reproduce: Update Thunderbird from v17 to v24. Actual results: With Folder pane visible, select to only list folders with unread messages ( View > Folders > Unread). The unread message counts of parent folders will be changed to reflect the total of all unread messages in the given (parent) folder and all of its subfolders. For example: [View > Folders > All] ParentFolder (1) SubA (4) SubB SubC (4) [View > Folders > Unread] ParentFolder (9) SubA (4) SubC (4) Note that the unread message count of ParentFolder was changed from "(1)" to "(9)". NOTE: I also found that this same roll-up of subfolder counts into the parent folder's count happens in the "All" view whenever a parent folder is collapsed. Expected results: I would expect the unread message counts listed next to any given folder to reflect only the true count of unread messages in that folder. This was the existing behavior prior to v24. While adding the ability to see the total of all messages in the given folder and all of its subfolders is nice, it should have been added as a configurable option. Even better, the message count in the folder list could have been extended to show both the count of messages in the given folder and a separate value to indicate the total count. Furthermore, the new "total" unread count should only be shown when viewing the "All" folder list. The reasoning here is that when the folder pane is in the "Unread" view, there is no visible tree structure and a given folder is only listed if it has an unread message. Taking the previous into consideration, I would like to see the following: [View > Folders > All] ParentFolder (1/9) SubA (4) SubB SubC (4) [View > Folders > Unread] ParentFolder (9) SubA (4) SubC (4)
I made a type-o in the "Expected results:", in Unread view mode, I expect the ParentFolder count to be 1 (not 9 as originally posted). So, ... Taking the previous into consideration, I would like to see the following: [View > Folders > All] ParentFolder (1/9) SubA (4) SubB SubC (4) [View > Folders > Unread] ParentFolder (1) SubA (4) SubC (4)
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Component: Untriaged → Folder and Message Lists
Ever confirmed: true
Keywords: regression
This regression happens after Tb 24. Tb 23 doesn't have this bug.
See Also: 917744 →
I don't think it's necessary to have a dual total (1/9 as indicated above by Brian Sleeth) but it is an error to show that messages are present for mailboxes which do not have messages. For servers such as Cyrus, which may have both messages and other mailboxes in a mailbox, the user will be confused when the folder pane shows that a mailbox has new messages, but once clicked on, it has no messages. The previous behavior was that a parent mailbox would display in <b>bold</b> when subsidiary mailboxes had unread messages. This was clear, and encouraged the user to drill down via the quick navigation tools (hierarchy arrows) in the folder pane. With the new behavior, a user may needlessly click on a parent folder, thinking it has new messages, when it does not. Not only does this cause unneeded GUI interaction, but it may produce excessive, unnecessary, IMAP protocol traffic. (Does this happen with POP3 mailboxes, as well?)
This problem also occurs when displaying "favorite" folders. I thought at first that there must be some problem with my Dovecot IMAP server, and it wasn't until I changed my folder view to "All" (in order to check a non-favourite folder) that I realized what was going on. At the very least, this new behaviour should be under the control of a preference option or configuration flag, and the old behaviour should be the default. I'm running Earlybird 26.0a2 (2013-10-12) on an Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS 64-bit desktop.
Yeah, we should probably avoid showing the total-including-subfolders for views that don't let you expand the folder to see its subfolders (i.e. Favorites, Unread, and Recent). That's pretty confusing. I don't think we need to do anything else here, though. It shouldn't be hard to write an extension that changes things up if people have more specific needs.
Jim, I'm not sure I understand what you said. Are you saying the current behaviour should be changed back, or that the change should stay? Which group of users (those who do want unread totals to include subfolders, or those who do not) should rely on an extension to get what they want?
I think the behavior should stay the same as it is now for the All and Unified views, and go back to the old way for Favorites, Unread, and Recent views. For All and Unified, it's very easy to see the number you'd have seen in the old version: expand the folder. It's not so easy for Favorites, Unread, or Recent, and the UI there is pretty confusing right now.
It's actually *not* easy to see the number you would have seen previously in the Unified view, alas. Many maildir stores put all of the mail folders as sub-folders of the inbox, and in the unified view for an IMAP connection to these accounts this causes the inbox at the top to show the unread count for the entire account, rather than just the unread count for the inbox itself. The subfolders aren't visible there, however, so there's no easy way to get the unread count for the inbox.
From the end user perspective, it makes no sense to me to show all the unread mail in the inbox count, whether they they can be reached in that view or not. After all, that is exactly why I filter the other messages to other folder, so I don't need to bother with them on real time basis. Also, I would find it weird that the count depends on the view (Unified/Unread/whatever), unless the view actually compiles all the unread messages to the message list when the folder in question is selected. If there are people who prefer it that way, then I'd suggest making it an option in the settings. This change is SO annoying I'll be looking to revert until its fixed.
I can confirm this behaviour with an TB 24.1.0 under WinXP SP3 32bit, but not with TB 24.1.0 unter WIN 7 SP1 64bit. Both German versions.
This new behaviour has turned into a very annoying situation. My IMAP inbox shows over 5,000 "unread" messages coming from the /Trash folder (which is also used for spam messages). And I cannot (tried without success) unsubscribe from the Trash folder to avoid seeing the new messages which makes my IMAP account totally useless.
The new behaviour is very annoying and unproductive. Please revert it to the previous behaviour whereby the unread count is only for the specific folder. Many of us that deal with large volumes of email filter incoming mail into subfolders to read later and to keep our inbox "clean". Also a lot of email gets filtered into the Trash folder, which for some accounts is a subfolder of the inbox. For reasons that I don't fully understand some imap accounts create additional folders which are subfolders of "inbox". It makes no sense whatsoever that my inbox shows I have over 5,000 unread messages when in fact the unread count in my inbox is zero. I rely on the unread count for my inbox to know when I need to read incoming mail for a specific account. If the unread count for an inbox is wildly inaccurate how do I know I need to pay attention to an account? PLEASE PLEASE revert this change, it makes no sense to me whatsoever.
FYI. Bug 917886 was opened due to performance problem. However, fixing that bug will surely resolve problem of this bug in following cases, because user will be able to kill the new feature. (a) user loves View/All, doesn't need "number of unread e-mails in subfolders". user can't accept slowdown by the feature. (b) user loves View/Unified etc., doesn't want problem of this bug due to the feature. new feature is not so important for user. "ideal solution of that bug" which a developer calls in that bug, and correct fixing of this bug is needed for following case only. (c) new feature is pretty important for user, but user can't be torelant with this bug.
Summary: Unread message count including counts from subfolders → Unread message count including counts from subfolders is pretty confusing in Unified View, Favarite View etc., rather, wrong display for users
> PLEASE PLEASE revert this change, it makes no sense to me whatsoever. You perhaps better to add "should be optional" to bug summary of this bug. How about new bug summary of "Feature to count and show number of unread e-mails in subfolders should be optional", which is absolutely same as that bug? :-)
Sorry, wrong bug number. FYI. Bug 939462 was opened due to performance problem.
Note to anyone who might be having the same problem as me. I'd noticed that the inbox new message counts in "unified view" mode for all of my accounts were sometimes showing counts for just the inbox, and sometimes for all of the subfolders in the account. Couldn't figure out why. Finally realized that it toggled by pressing enter or double-clicking on the inbox title. Basically, it's acting as though the subfolders are being toggled open and closed, even though the UI for the subfolders has been moved elsewhere. This is very awkward UI and IMO still a bug, but I'm glad to at least have a workaround that makes my unread count usable again.
I noticed that the other day, but did not take a closer look. It does appear that if you are in one of the summary views (Unified, Unread Folders, etc.), selecting a folder and pressing Enter will cause the unread count for that folder to toggle between the unread in that folder only and the unread in that folder + all subfolders. Additionally, it appears that Thunderbird remembers your last setting for each folder ... even after restarting. So, in lieu of a preference or any other visible way of changing this setting, we can at least revert the behavior by manually toggling the setting on each folder.
Forgive the question, but can someone confirm if this reported behavior -- <enter> toggles unread display setting -- works for the Inbox and other traditional folders? Or, does it only work for "synthetic" folders, such as "Unified Inbox"? I have reverted all my machines to older versions, so cannot test this myself.
@Rob Miller: Great find. I can confirm that <enter> has this effect on all five folder view modes(all, unified, unread, favorite, recent). Only on the 'All' mode does it expand/collapse any subfolders.
IMHO it's not much of a workaround. The "All" view mode is the only one that makes sense for my work habits. In All mode the only way to see the unread count for just the inbox is to have all the subfolders expanded. But since I have a large number of subfolders in multiple accounts keeping all the subfolders expanded is not viable.
Please also change this for the "All" view, not only the favorites etc views. I filter some types of mails to subfolders I rarely look at, and thus I usually have them collapsed. Thus the parent folder is shown with an incredibly high number of unread mails which makes the unread count completely useless. @all: did someone already spot an extension that fixes this behavior?
Setting dependency to bug 939462, for ease of tracking, search, understanding bug.
Depends on: 939462
(In reply to mozbugs from comment #22) Read bug 939462, please.
Turning off config option mail.folderpane.sumSubfolders fixes this. But it is still wrong and needs to be fixed in the next build.
Yes, we should do not count the subfolders in views where it makes no sense. I can look at that. For the other views, in TB45 we improved the display so that it indicates with a downarrow before the number if the subfolders contributed to the number. So you would get the arrow in case of: ParentFolder (v9) SubA (4) SubC (4) But not in case of: ParentFolder (9) SubA SubC Also there is a tooltip to show how many items there are in the parent folder and how many in the subfolders. See bug 1190609. So you can take advantage of that feature. Or you can disabled the counting of subfolders in all cases as in comment 25.
Assignee: nobody → acelists
OS: Windows 7 → All
Hardware: x86_64 → All
Summary: Unread message count including counts from subfolders is pretty confusing in Unified View, Favarite View etc., rather, wrong display for users → Unread message count including counts from subfolders is pretty confusing in Unified View, Favorite View etc., rather, wrong display for users

My Thunderbird recently updated itself from v76.x (ish) to v91.x and I noticed my Unified Inbox view started showing massive email numbers and sizes in the Unread, Total and Size columns. When I hovered over those numbers a popup would tell me how many were in the various subfolders - I did not want or need this showing for my Inboxes (when in unified view).

I tried the trick shown above from 'b' 6 years ago by setting to false the mail.folderpane.sumSubfolders and it worked a treat. Is this a bug that has crept back in?

I have experienced exactly the same issue as mrartist in the above comment. TB updated itsself to 91.2.0 (64-bit) and suddenly I had thousands of unread emails, including my iunk folder. Marking them all read only temporarily fixes the issue since there is a lot of junk coming in frequently. Changing the retention policy of the account is just fighting symptoms, since I have a lot of email acocunts. I could maybe achieve that all junk is marked read but in my opinion it is wrong to do that, since I have not really read them. And if I occasionally browse the junk for false positives I wanna know which messages I have already read.

Additionally, the parent folder count does not even make sense anymore now. In my case it looks like this:

Inbox (7)

  • acct 1 (139903)
  • acct 2 (5105)
  • acct 3 (10506)

7 in this case is the correct unread count in the main folders. The rest only concerns the junk folder or other subfolders where I filter some automated messages away for archiving.

To me this seems like an unfinished feature. Is there a way to exclude specific folders from the count?

I have to mention that indeed the 7 year old trick with going to the config editor and setting mail.folderpane.sumSubfolders to false still works.

Severity: normal → S3
Duplicate of this bug: 1690777
See Also: → 1730531

Does this still reproduce for you in version 115?

Flags: needinfo?(ta-bugzilla)
Flags: needinfo?(lukas)

Personally, I did not see this bug any more.

Me neither.
And just for the record, my setting «mail.folderpane.sumSubfolders» is set to its default value «true» yet still I cannot reproduce the bug anymore.

Due to missing critical features in v115 I'm still on v102 but thought I'd check anyway as I'd fogotten what this issue was about seeing I still had «mail.folderpane.sumSubfolders» set to false which fixed the problem.

I can confirm that when changing that setting back to true, in Unified view, I see two different values for when 'Unread' is set on or off.

When 'Unread' is set to off, for the parent folder I see the total including the sub folders and there is a down arrow to the left of that figure (I don't recall that arrow before?) - when I hover on that a small pop-up shows me two values (the split totals), one for that parent folder and the other for all subfolders.

When 'Unread' is set to on, I see just the lower figure of the parent folder's unread messages (no arrows or sub folder number showing).

Flags: needinfo?(ta-bugzilla)
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