[ale] Thunderbird vs. Dovecot: "imap new mail checking"

[Steve Tynor]

James P. Kinney III wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 12:00 -0400, Steve Tynor wrote:
> 
>>I read my mail with Thunderbird 1.0.2 via IMAP on a FedoraCore3-hosted 
>>dovecot  0.99.11-1.FC3.4) server.
>>
>>It all works very nicely except that "new mail" checking seems to be 
>>unreliable. I use procmail to deliver to a dozen or so mailboxes and 
...
> Are all of the separate accounts marked "active" or "check" or some such
> way to identify which ones should be auto-checked?
> 
> Another thing: only the Inbox is polled on checking for new mail. If you
> have procmail doing the sorting into boxes _other_ than the "official"
> inbox, tbird has no way of knowing the state change until it actually
> looks at the container.

Well, actually, Thunderbird can (and often does correctly :-)) monitor 
more than one folder as an Inbox.  Click right on the 
folder->Properties...->Check this folder for new messages.  It's just 
that often it seems to be quite delayed about noticing new mail in some 
folders.  Often times it's immediate. Sometimes delayed by an hour. 
Sometimes never notices new mail at all until you click or otherwise 
browse to the folder.  But works properly often enough to keep me from 
seeking alternate an email client :-).

> You may want to use the mail filters in Tbird to put the mail into the
> folders automatically when it retrieves the mail from dovecot. That way
> it knows the size changed.

I prefer to run procmail on the server side to cut down on IMAP traffic 
so I don't have to read lots of spam / noisy mailing lists etc when I'm 
on the road and on a slow link.

Thanks for the advice, but I don't think it quite applies to my situation.

Steve