IMAP bugs

[Jules Bean <jules jellybean co uk>]

Hi all,

I have finally got round to building 1.1.1 as a debian package.

Testing it locally, I loaded up with my old (1.0pre5) .balsa, which
seemed OK. Loading my INBOX from the server took quite a while (1500
messages!) -- would be nice to have some status messages while this is
happening.

When it opened the inbox, it went straight to the oldest unread
message, and of couse displayed it in the preview pane.  This wasn't
quite what I wanted -- I mark messages as unread again when I want to
remember to deal with them later; so it was annoying to have this one
marked read. (Not really a bug, more of a usage problem; I'm open to
suggestions on a different way of doing things which would help).

The message threading is cool; kudos for that.  It looks a little odd
to me that all the message seem to be 'connected' as if they were all
in the same thread...

I tried to new IMAP folder support (this is really important to me; I
have 60 IMAP mailboxes or so, and new ones appear all the time). 

I didn't enter a password in the new folder dialog, (I was expected it 
to ask me at login time), but it worked it out; must have been because 
there was already a connection to that IMAP server open for INBOX. It
found all the folders, but: (this is the first real bug)

It couldn't open any of the mailboxes it found. "Unable to open
mailbox, plaease check mailbox settings" was the error it gave, but
experimentation shows that the error was to do with the config for the
folder not having a password in it. I.e. it was capable of getting the
folder list by inferring the password from another connection to the
same server, but couldn't get mailbox contents that way.

Then I couldn't quit balsa; quitting just hung it.

Logging back in to balsa and setting the password correctly on the
folder, I can get further and browse through my folders. Nice.  It
still feels very clunky (I have 112K ADSL) because there is no visual
feedback while the networking happens.  I would suggest, as a minimum:

1) Make the mailbox look 'selected' before doing the network
traffic. This tells the user his 'click' was noticed.

2) Change the curser to a clock or hourglass or something.  (Better
still, a progress bar down in the bottom of the window).

It also seems impossible to delete IMAP folders without editing .balsa
by hand.

For all these reasons, I can't quite switch to balsa yet for my
regular mailer; but it's looking much, much better!

While I'm on the subject, pressing 'check' seems to check all
available mailboxes; which is great.  But it really needs to give some 
feedback while it's doing it --- perhaps update the unread and total
columns as it goes. In fact, updating th unread and total columns at
all would be nice ;-)

Jules