Thunderbird IMAP folder checking
June 11, 2007
At work, most of us use procmail to conveniently filter our mail into folders to keep a semblance of organization. I don’t know how it took me so long to find this, because I know I’ve tried to search for it before. Lo and behold, it’s located (maybe newly?) on the Tips and Tricks page. This great feature I’m talking about is the simple ability for Thunderbird to check all of my folders for new mail automatically, rather than only my Inbox. I know about folder subscriptions, the problem with those is that I have several profiles for which I’d have to do this on each of them, and I’d have to redo them every time I wiped my profile and started fresh.
Now that I’ve figured out how to do this, I’m pretty set on Thunderbird as my email client of choice.
June 11, 2007 at 11:46 am
I still don’t understand why this is a buried feature. It seems like such a simple, intuitive option that everyone would likely choose to use if it were more accessible.
Thanks for pointing it out!
June 11, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Damn, and to think that I just setup subfolder checking on all my thunderbird accounts manually. This would have been much easier.
My guess is that this is off by default for performance reasons? Seems like checking a ton of nested folders could take a while with some IMAP servers. (*cough*AOL*cough*)
June 11, 2007 at 12:39 pm
One misleading part of the tip as they have posted is that they claim you can “download mail from all accounts when you start the program” but it’s working as I had hoped it would, checking at the same time as the regularly scheduled Inbox checks (or when I “Get Mail”).
August 1, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Wow – thanks. I was Googling for a solution and I too will be making it my client of choice now that IMAP folders can be checked :)
August 12, 2007 at 1:42 pm
This was driving me crazy! At first I thought the IMAP support was broken. I had my one IMAP profile entry set to check every 10 minutes, but it wasn’t. It would only show messages when I manually checked for new mail.
Why is there even an option under server settings for checking new messages at a given interval once the server is defined as an IMAP server, and the above mentioned option ISN’T set to true? GUI morons….
August 28, 2007 at 7:22 am
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