Re: IMAP bugs

[Pawel Salek <pawsa TheoChem kth se>]

On 2001-02-14 14:40 Jules Bean wrote:
> 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.

There is a quite functional patch for this in CVS (I will probably
commit tonight a fix for some GDK locking problems). More on this later.

> 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).

I think there is an option to disable this in Preferences
("Automatically view message when opened").


> 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). 

Thanks for your feedback on it: IMAP folders scanning conde definetely
should handle better authentication/connection problems. I am still not
quite happy with it, both frontend- and backend-wise. I focus myself on
the backend first because I have just one life. 

> 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:

CVS version prints "Opening mailbox XXX. Please wait..." and keeps UI
active (as long as you don't hit global mutt lock; see discussion
later). I think it should not be difficult to add some kind of progress
bar, too. It would be pretty straight-forward to do the same for opening
mails, with the same problem as for opening mailboxes.

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

I personally dislike programs playing with the mouse pointer,
particularly when they crash and leave it in some strange shape :-).

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

This will come as soon as I get the backend cleaned.

Many of the existing deficiences come from the fact that we have one
global lock for mutt. Because of that, opening one mailbox while
composing/sending mail is not really possible: opening mailbox keeps
mutt mailbox held and sending will lock until it is released. We could
probably introduce lock timeouts and return TEMPORARY_ERROR codes but I
think we have more serious problems now to solve than to make balsa
ultra-threading.

/Pawel
-- 
Pawel Salek (pawsa@theochem.kth.se) http://www.theochem.kth.se/~pawsa/
Theoretical Chemistry Division, KTH voice: +46 8 790-8202