Re: balsa imap support... how broken is it?

[Pawel Salek <pawsa theochem kth se>]

On 04/13/2005 04:41:37 PM, Dmitry Golubev wrote:
>  Hello,   I seem to be a bit confused with the IMAP support in balsa  
> 2.3.0. The  thing is  that I have two IMAP accounts (hosted on the  
> same courier server, if  it makes  any difference), each of them  
> having a small hierarchy of folders,  and, most  importantly, about  
> 50 different folders in one of the accounts.
> I have observed a very serious problem: whatever I do it can not
> display the number of unread messages in _all_ the folders I have.

This operation can generally be time-consuming and not all system  
administrators would accept mail clients that issue STATUS for all  
existing mailboxes.

>  First attempt has failed completely, when I disabled balsa to show   
> the  account  statistics. My initial expectation was that if I do  
> that, it would  display  the number of unread messages right after  
> the folder name, in  parentheses  (just like Kmail does it), but that  
> was my huge mistake to expect  such  an  advanced feature. I fact, it  
> could not even discover a new mail (and  mark  folder name in bold)  
> entering a mailbox in this mode!

As funny as it may seem, doing it right is more complicated than it  
appears at the first sight. KMail, with it advanced mailbox checking,  
was not able to open a mailbox on my imap server in half an hour (it  
takes 30 seconds for balsa to scan the mailboxes and open the first  
one). I am sure KMAil imap support is solid in many aspects (it looks  
that way) but it is not a one-size fits-all solution.

Btw, does setting Mail OPtions/Incoming/Check imap mailboxes + Check  
mailboxes automatically changes anything for you? If it does not, can  
you provide the dump of imap conversation as obtained when running  
balsa with -D option? Is it the lack of exact statistics that bothers  
you or just marking which mailboxes may contain new mail would be fine  
for you?

Pawel

>  OK, then I enabled statistics, and had to go manually through all  
> the  folders,  for balsa to determine the amount of unread mail in  
> each of them. I  would  even accept that fact, if this status would  
> be remembered next time I  opened  the balsa. But no, next time I  
> started balsa, the status has  disappeared!!!  After half-an-hour  
> search through all possible options, I found  "Remember  open  
> mailboxes between sessions". But it started to behave rather  strange  
> on  startup: it is scanning _some_ of the folders in _random_order_,   
> jumping  through my folder view like crazy, but still ignores some  
> (random) of  the  folders I previously had opened.   So now when I  
> start Balsa, I need to click on some random folders for  Balsa to   
> read their status... In my opinion, it is a major bug, but as I am   
> new  to  Balsa, I thought I should ask the list first before jumping  
> into  conclusions.  I expect there is just a small numerical limit on  
> the folders it  remembers.  Either that or a completely broken IMAP  
> client library.
> Thanks,
> Dmtiry