Daily Archives: December 1, 2004

Checking IMAP Sub-Folders with Thunderbird

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Another of those “I couldn’t find the answer on Google so I’ll write it here” postings.

By default, Thunderbird only checks your Inbox for new messages (which stems from a POP3 legacy). If you have server-side rules (or use a web interface to do your rules), then you’ll want Thunderbird to check subfolders as well. This can be done by right-clicking the folder in question, selecting properties, and ticking the appropriate box. There’s no(t yet an) option to do this globally.

Applies to Thunderbird 0.9.

Update: April 2008

Years later, even with Thunderbird 2.0, this is still a problem. But there’s now a global option, thankfully. Although it’s completely hidden, it saves a lot of time if you’ve got lots of subfolders.

Open up the preferences dialog (either Tools -> Preferences or Edit -> Preferences), and click Advanced -> General -> Config Editor. In the filter box start typing ‘mail.check’ and then double click on mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new. It should then change the value to true (and it’ll appear in bold since you’ve changed it) and all should hopefully be hunky-dory.

More Open-Source goodness

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Thunderbird is my latest addition to my work PC, so that I can check my gravitystorm emails without using the web interface that my provider, umm, provides. The only problem is that all my filtering rules are run by the web interface, so I need to keep that open in firefox to filter all the messages into the appropriate folders. I need to sort the filters out to be server-side at some point, but never underestimate my laziness.

I found today that Psi and OpenOffice.org have installed themselves quite weirdly – i.e. they’ve added themselves to the startup folder as a network path (cs-cxgeneral6c$blah), instead of a local path (C:blah). Which explains why Psi pops up no matter what machine I log on to. It took me worryingly long to realise what was going on. I’m contemplating doing a similar thing for Firefox and Thunderbird, but I’ve no idea what that would do to my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles.

Ho Hum.