Bug 115426 - imap personal namespace has no effect
Summary: imap personal namespace has no effect
Status: RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Alias: None
Product: kmail
Classification: Applications
Component: IMAP (show other bugs)
Version: 1.8.92
Platform: Gentoo Packages Linux
: NOR normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: kdepim bugs
URL:
Keywords:
: 133920 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2005-10-31 16:22 UTC by Ryan Winter
Modified: 2015-04-12 09:51 UTC (History)
15 users (show)

See Also:
Latest Commit:
Version Fixed In:


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Description Ryan Winter 2005-10-31 16:22:16 UTC
Version:           1.8.92 (using KDE KDE 3.4.92)
Installed from:    Gentoo Packages
Compiler:          gcc 3.4.4 
OS:                Linux

Choosing INBOX. as my personal namespace. I expected to see all the folders inside this namespace to appear in the root as it did with KDE 3.4.4's PREFIX option. It doesnt seem to have any effect in this version.
Comment 1 Carsten Burghardt 2005-10-31 19:21:38 UTC
> Choosing INBOX. as my personal namespace. I expected to see all the folders
> inside this namespace to appear in the root as it did with KDE 3.4.4's
> PREFIX option. It doesnt seem to have any effect in this version.


What do you mean with "no effect"?
What personal namespaces are shown in your account configuration? Did you 
modify them?
Comment 2 Ryan Winter 2005-11-01 15:54:45 UTC
I am using courier imap and this places all everything in a INBOX namespace. Previously in kde 3.4.3 I would set INBOX in the prefix config box and would end up with the structure:

my imap
|
+-inbox
+-personal
+-sent
+-trash

With kde 3.5 it automatically detects a personal namespace of "INBOX." however the folders are displayed as:

my imap
|
+-inbox
  |
  +-personal
  +-sent
  +-trash

With all folders contained within the inbox folder.

I have tried modifying the personal namespace with things like "inbox" but it nothing seems to fix the situation.
Comment 3 Carsten Burghardt 2005-11-01 20:30:23 UTC
> With kde 3.5 it automatically detects a personal namespace of "INBOX."
> however the folders are displayed as:
>
> my imap
>
> +-inbox
>
>   +-personal
>   +-sent
>   +-trash
>
> With all folders contained within the inbox folder.


Well, this is the correct way to display the folders. The old prefix was a 
hack and there were some crude workarounds included to make it work. The 
structure that you see now is exactly how the server reports it.
Comment 4 Ryan Winter 2005-11-02 11:59:55 UTC
Thats fair enough, I was just confused because I though the new namespace option was suppose to produce the same effect. Looking at the kmail help i found the following:

"If you are using IMAP, you can optionally specify a path in the Prefix to folders field. This tells KMail where it can find your folders on the server. If you also have a shell account on the server and the messages are stored in your home folder it might be useful to store the messages in a subfolder Mail. Use this as a value in the Prefix to folders field so that KMail does not mix up mailbox files and other files."

Although I dont have this problem at the moment, I have in the past and the prefix meant I could use kmail. Is the prefix option going to be reintroduced in the future?

Thanks for responding so quickly.
Comment 5 Mathias Homann 2005-11-22 09:19:30 UTC
I sure hope so.

Wish for having the pre-3.5 look back is seconded. I got used to having all folders as subfolders under the account, instead of under the inbox folder... besides, this change makes kmail crash on start when you have imap folders configured as "sent" and "drafts" folders, and have been using the folder prefix (so that, for example, "sent" was imap-account/sent and now is imap-account/inbox/sent).


...was this change even mentioned somewhere in the 3.5 changelogs?
Comment 6 Stefan Kebekus 2005-12-05 07:38:23 UTC
Hello,

quoting from the mail above:

"If you also have a shell account on the server and the messages are stored in your home folder it might be useful to store the messages in a subfolder Mail. Use this as a value in the Prefix to folders field so that KMail does not mix up mailbox files and other files." 

I do have this kind of setup, and I do no longer know how to configure my IMAP account properly. When I started KDE 3.5 for the first time, a little dialog box appeared to tell me that my configuration was converted to a new "namespace" scheme (for which I couldn't find any documentation), then my e-mail account got screwed up badly.

As I use e-mail for my job, I cannot allow things to happen to my mail so that I had to switch to Mozilla Mail after upgrading to KDE 3.5. :-(

I would prefer to use KMail, so are there any ideas what I could do?

Best,

Stefan.
Comment 7 Josh Metzler 2005-12-07 16:28:37 UTC
When I upgraded to kde 3.5, kmail crashed the first few times I checked for new mail.  Then it finally rebuilt the folder tree so that folders show as subfolders of inbox.  Once this happened, it appears to work, though it lost all of its cached information, so it takes a very long time when first opening new folders.

I also would like the old view back - I need to make my folder pane wider now to view the folder names, since they are now all subfolders of inbox.

At the very least, making kmail do this reconfiguration automatically the first time it starts up would be ideal, rather than crashing multiple times.
Comment 8 Josh Metzler 2005-12-10 16:47:23 UTC
> With kde 3.5 it automatically detects a personal namespace of "INBOX." 
 > however the folders are displayed as: 
 > 
 > my imap 
 > 
> > +-inbox 
> > 
> >   +-personal 
> >   +-sent 
> >   +-trash 
> > 
> > With all folders contained within the inbox folder. 
>  
> 
> Well, this is the correct way to display the folders. The old prefix was a 
> hack and there were some crude workarounds included to make it work. The 
> structure that you see now is exactly how the server reports it. 

I believe the old prefix was a hack, and see that Namespaces are much better (and follow the relevant rfc2342).  But, *this is not the correct way to show them*.  Yes, Courier reports INBOX.mailbox, but "INBOX." is the namespace, not part of the path.

See also, http://www.courier-mta.org/FAQ.html#namespace
Comment 9 Thomas Haenig 2005-12-13 11:20:13 UTC
Though the old prefix was a hack it worked faster then the correct implemantation. 

The new look is only a bit unfamiliar but one may live with it. 

But what is more displeasingly is, it takes now several minutes (via a DSL connection) to synchronize kMail with the IMAP account containing some 11000 mails. 
Comment 10 Thomas Haenig 2005-12-13 11:25:40 UTC
*** This bug has been confirmed by popular vote. ***
Comment 11 Carsten Burghardt 2005-12-14 10:06:17 UTC
@Stefan: go to the account configuration, edit your personal namespaces. You probably have an <Empty> part in there. Replace this with "Mail". And delete the ~ Shared namespace. *Sigh* UW is such a crap.
Comment 12 Carsten Burghardt 2005-12-14 10:19:27 UTC
@Josh: KMail uses the namespace and therefore knows that a folder called "INBOX.test" has to be displayed as "test". But I'm not convinced that the hierarchy has to be displayed in a different way. INBOX is a mailbox which has the path /INBOX/ by definition. So if a server chooses to use this as a prefix I would say that the mailboxes should also be displayed like this.
Nevertheless this has low priority for me as it's only a display issue. I'm more interested to iron out the remaining bugs of the namespace support.
I will leave this report open as one can argue about the way to display the folders but *please* don't add random thoughts and problems under this single report.
Comment 13 Greisberger Christophe 2005-12-14 23:39:47 UTC
Argh!
I just upgraded to KDE 3.5 and had this problem.
It sucks (excuse-me, I'm a bit shocked).

I have the same argument as the other guys:
It adds an (unneeded) level more to the tree, what is really annoying for the pane size, 

Other mail clients (like thunderbird) have the same problem (ignoring the namespace) - mainly with courier & courier-imap servers -. But they allow to set a prefix to have all the folders back at the root level.
Perhaps adding the possibility for the users to set the prefix manually, or even a "strip namespace" checkbox would be the right solution.

It was perhaps a hack, but please keep a backward compatibility.
*P*L*E*A*A*A*S*E* ! m(__)m

I have other personnal arguments:
1. I have 4GB of mails on my mail server.
   They are currently cached (cached IMAP), and redownloading everything...
2. I selected lots of nice icons for my zillions of subfolders... and it would
   make me crazy to have to set them up again!
Comment 14 Josh Metzler 2005-12-15 15:12:05 UTC
After living with it for a couple days, the folders as subfolders of inbox doesn't bother me as much.  Sure, a "strip namespace" checkbox would be great (on by default, since previous kmail versions did this with prefix).

What bothers be is:
1. Kmail crashes on mail checks until the folder list is rebuilt.
2. Cached headers (or whole mails for dimap) are wasted and need redownloaded.

It seems there is code to migrate Prefix -> Namespace.  It would be great if Kmail, when it found a prefix, would automatically rebuild the folder tree, and just move all the cached headers/mails under .kde/share/apps/kmail/[d]imap/ to the right place.

If any Kmail developers want an imap account on a Courier IMAP server to work on this, I can provide one.
Comment 15 kde 2006-01-04 14:30:39 UTC
When using Courier IMAP, all folders are subfolders of Inbox (which I don't
like at all) even when the INBOX namespace is set.

Now I'd like to change some folder subscriptions, but no matter what I try,
I always see Inbox in the left pane as only folder, and I'm unable to
change the subscription status of the subfolders of Inbox.
Comment 16 Maciej Dems 2006-01-11 11:23:33 UTC
The REAL problem  with the new style is the transition - the need to download the whole inbox in chache IMAP and the need to configure all the folders once again. The current unexpected behaviour is unacceptable for serious use. And the way teh folders are dispalyed should be crafted for usability and not necesarily to represent the physical structure. The option 'strip namespaces' to control this bahaviour (on by default) is the perfect and much needed solution.
Comment 17 kde 2006-02-04 09:54:31 UTC
The problem reported by me in comment 15 (about subfolders not visible in subscription window) seems to be fixed in KDE 3.5.1
Comment 18 Greisberger Christophe 2006-02-15 20:03:37 UTC
Just a question: do you plan to do this "strip namespace" thing?
I just upgraded to 3.5.1, hoping to get the folders back to the account root.
I'm somewhat disappointed...

I'm currently using Thunderbird since 2 months and I miss kmail :'(
Comment 19 Andy Parkins 2006-02-19 18:18:52 UTC
I don't think it is correct to say that INBOX.test is a sub-folder of INBOX.  The problem is that the namespace is INBOX but there is also a special folder called INBOX.

INBOX will always exist; if you use something other than courier, then the default namespace could be anything.

I think this problem gets worse when multiple namespaces are available.  It should be possible to map a namespace to a folder in Kmail's folder list (including the root of an account).  This would fix this bug and make KMail much better at multiple namespaces.

Comment 20 Dan A. Dickey 2006-03-03 14:46:59 UTC
I'll add another couple of cents...
I'm not sure how many people run kmail in this fashion, but I have a "local"
account that is used for sending email.  It also has an inbox, outbox, sent-mail, trash, drafts.. etc etc... And a bunch of storage folders that I
created.  I also have an imap account that I use for receiving email, it has
an inbox with all the folders on that imap server as subfolders under inbox.
This is in fact a local courier-imapd server.

The interesting thing to note is that for the local account, all the folders
are folders under the account name, not under inbox.  And for the imap account,
all the folders are subfolders under inbox.

This seems a pretty obvious discontinuity in UI work.

Please make it work the same for all account types.
Personally, I prefer my folders to be under the account and not under inbox.
Perhaps make it kmail configurable?
Comment 21 Greisberger Christophe 2006-03-05 00:58:27 UTC
Yes pleaaaase! ^^;
Make it this way:

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton

(Nice no? Just found it).
Comment 22 Ryan Olf 2006-03-08 19:20:15 UTC
In 3.5.1, if I manually change the namespace to "inbox." (lowercase), folders are displayed under the root *as well as* under inbox.  Collapsing the folders under "inbox," things look just as they did before.  It doesn't seem like this is the way things could be (since the namespace is actually "INBOX."), but in the meantime it cleans up the display.
Comment 23 Ryan Olf 2006-03-08 20:59:44 UTC
Actually, the workaround in comment #22, unsurprisingly, seems to cause some strange problems with folders (looking for inbox.INBOX.Sent...), so I don't recommend it.
Comment 24 Thefrog 2006-03-22 10:13:50 UTC
I upgraded my laptop yesterday from KDE 3.4.1 to 3.5.1 and run into similiar problems:

I'm running the UW imap over ssl in my private network.
In the home of my mailserver there is a Mail subfolder containing all my mail stuff, but actual kmail shows all folders of my home directory and hangs.
This makes it unusable :-(

As my other boxes (both linux and solaris with kde) are still on kde 3.4.x, I will need this backward compability to the old prefix-hack :-(

Is there a workaround for this prefix things in the namespaces concept?
Reading all the comment here it is not quite clear to me..

best regards
Rainald
Comment 25 Thefrog 2006-03-23 07:35:01 UTC
As written in Comment #11,
it helps to set the personal namespace to the name of the prefix folder.
But it seems to have no effect unless you recreate the account, it does not wipe out all e the other folders of my home dir automatically.

Now it seems to work fine.

regards
rainald
Comment 26 Carsten Schlipf 2006-04-08 16:09:34 UTC
PLEASE!!! Allow me to strip the Namespace... It's a NAMESPACE, not a FOLDER.
Comment 27 Greisberger Christophe 2006-04-09 12:53:26 UTC
Sad, no change in KDE 3.5.2
Comment 28 Carsten Burghardt 2006-04-09 13:03:44 UTC
> Sad, no change in KDE 3.5.2


This is a new feature and thus not allowed in the branch. We can only 
implement this is in kde 4.
Comment 29 Carsten Schlipf 2006-04-09 14:04:16 UTC
Depends... what you consider as feature is what I consider as bugfix. Previously it worked (me as a simple user does not care, why this changed and wheater it was a hack, you know), now it doesn't. So from a user perspective this is a bug.
Comment 30 Carsten Schlipf 2006-04-09 14:06:06 UTC
Another thing... OK, you have the namespace appearing as a folder. Is it then at least a bug, that on the 'virtual namespace folder' you can execute action like 'Create new subfolder', which should only be possible on real subfolders?
Comment 31 Greisberger Christophe 2006-04-11 23:28:33 UTC
Well, is it SO difficult to add this feature for the people that want KMail to stay backward compatible?

Even a hidden option in kmailrc would make me so damn happy that I could kiss you all :D
Comment 32 Greisberger Christophe 2006-04-12 01:51:12 UTC
> This is a new feature and thus not allowed in the branch. We can only 
> implement this is in kde 4. 
Hmmm. I should never send replies too late the evening...
(btw, it's not a new but an old feature, but let's stop here).
Will you add it to KDE 4?
Comment 33 Carsten Burghardt 2006-04-16 17:43:32 UTC
> Will you add it to KDE 4?


Probably yes.
Comment 34 Julian Mehnle 2006-04-23 16:32:17 UTC
I second the need for namespaces not being treated 1:1 as folders.  Currently, it displays the "Sent" and "Trash" folders (next to all the others, of course) within the "inbox" folder, which from a intuitive POV just doesn't make sense -- who on earth would keep their sent mail and trash in boxes within their inbox?  Besides, the additional sub-folder level wastes valuable screen space because the folder pane has to be made wider.

I look forward to KMail being able to display things as they were in KDE 3.4.
Comment 35 Frans Englich 2006-09-11 19:17:18 UTC
*** Bug 133920 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 36 Frans Englich 2006-09-11 19:19:26 UTC
Yes, here's another vote for not having folders being children of the inbox folder. http://www.inter7.com/courierimap/FAQ.html#namespace seems to be another source saying it's a bug in the MUA.

It would be nice if this bug was fixed during the 3.x series.


Frans
Comment 37 Frans Englich 2006-09-11 19:39:15 UTC
Is it correct that no workaround exist?
Comment 38 Greisberger Christophe 2006-10-02 10:22:59 UTC
Did someone check KDE4?
It's not yet available on my distrib.
Comment 39 Staffan Hamala 2006-10-10 15:29:29 UTC
Very annoying that it's not possible to set a prefix anymore. I have a standard unix system, and use my home directory naturally contains lots of files.
So, it's extremely annoying that every time I want to manage the subscription, kmail takes ages to scan through the 100000+ files in all other directories..
Comment 40 Andy Parkins 2007-01-31 16:19:34 UTC
I've just been bitten by a really good reason that the INBOX should not be the effective root of all the other folders.

I had a dimap cache corruption in KMail, and wanted to redownload the messages in the INBOX.  However, doing Troubleshoot IMAP->Refresh Cache works on the selected folder and all subfolders.

So, in order to refetch 14 messages, I would have to redownload my entire 1.5GB mail archive, all because INBOX is incorrectly seen as being the parent of all my other folders.
Comment 41 Thomas Haenig 2007-05-11 13:10:54 UTC
Today I have done a KDE update and it seems this bug has been fixed?
The inbox seems to be where it belongs (hopefully not only optical ;-)

Could someone confirm this?

now it says: KMail 1.9.6 (KDE 3.5.6 "release 85.1" openSuSE)


Thomas
Comment 42 Dan A. Dickey 2007-05-11 13:51:47 UTC
Nope - no change here.
I'm running "KMail 1.9.6 (Using KDE 3.5.6)" built on a Gentoo system.
Comment 43 Tilman Vogel 2007-05-11 15:13:42 UTC
I did the buildservice update on SuSE Linux 10.0 today as well and the bug is not fixed. 
By setting the namespace to "inbox" on account creation, you can get the folders to show as siblings to the inbox instead of children of it, but you can't open them. kmail says they were all empty :-(
Comment 44 Greisberger Christophe 2008-07-15 21:53:50 UTC
I now understand the interest to display all folders under inbox.
We now have shared imap folders here, and it would be confusing having the inbox subfolders at the root level, with "shared". Even worst if inbox also contains a subfolder also named "shared"...
Comment 45 Carsten Schlipf 2009-02-27 22:49:07 UTC
Comment #33 says that the developers wanted to fix this with KDE 4. In the meantime KDE 4.2 is out, but I no longer use courier IMAP. Can anyone verify, if this has been fixed?

With my current IMAP Account I cannot verify this.
Comment 46 Greisberger Christophe 2009-03-03 07:55:23 UTC
No, still not.
Comment 47 hellgast 2009-09-11 11:12:06 UTC
(In reply to comment #45)
> Comment #33 says that the developers wanted to fix this with KDE 4. In the
> meantime KDE 4.2 is out, but I no longer use courier IMAP. Can anyone verify,
> if this has been fixed?
> 
> With my current IMAP Account I cannot verify this.

No still not in KDE 4.3.1
Comment 48 Thomas Haenig 2010-01-12 08:30:35 UTC
In OpenSuSE 11.2, KDE 4.3.1, kMail 1.12.2 the folder tree is still below inbox - but in between the IMAP server here is cyrus ...
Comment 49 Thomas Haenig 2011-03-18 09:59:41 UTC
In OpenSuSE 11.4, KDE 4.6.0, kMail 1.13.6 regardless of the personal namespace the folder tree is still below inbox.
Comment 50 Laurent Montel 2015-04-12 09:51:05 UTC
Thank you for taking the time to file a bug report.

KMail2 was released in 2011, and the entire code base went through significant changes. We are currently in the process of porting to Qt5 and KF5. It is unlikely that these bugs are still valid in KMail2.

We welcome you to try out KMail 2 with the KDE 4.14 release and give your feedback.