GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 748973
Labels are listed under Inbox on non-gmail IMAP
Last modified: 2019-01-15 05:46:51 UTC
Created attachment 302942 [details] Labels are shown as children of Inbox instead of children of Labels. On a standard mailbox provided by cPanel on CentOS, the IMAP structure lists folders as a child of Inbox. Geary does not account for this IMAP layout differential and so it displays all the Labels under "Inbox" and leaves the "Labels" button unclickable. ** See Attached Screenshot **
This is by design. A long time ago Geary did display those folders under Labels but was chastised by users who wanted them displayed under Inbox. I suppose we could have some kind of user setting, but that's something pretty technical and specific to certain styles of IMAP servers, and would like to avoid that.
In my account (dovecot server/roundcube webmail), I can create the folders where I want (under INBOX or in the main branch) and Geary will display them correctly where they are. I think this is the expected behaviour. It would be nice if the Labels folder would not appear at all if empty. Or maybe it should not appear at all for non-Gmail accounts? Now I try to explain why: Labels is a concept which is really true only for Gmail server, which stores all conversations in one phisical place but can display them in multiple labels *without copying them*. That is why they call it labels and not folders. Because we should imagine the conversation as always being in the same "folder" and label is just a property of the conversation which allows it to appear in different places without actually moving on disk. The other IMAP servers I know of don't work this way. They know only folders and a conversation can live in more than one folder only if it's copied (which makes the database grow). Correct me if I say anything not precise or wrong.
I've forwarded the Folders/Labels discussion to the mailing list: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/geary-list/2017-December/msg00044.html Back to this issue... I believe that Jim's comment is no more valid. I find the current description not useful, as it describes something correct. If you create a folder under Inbox and Geary shows it under Inbox, well this is what we expect to happen. On the other hand, if on the server you create a mail folder in the root (where Inbox and other special folders are located) Geary will show this folder under Labels, unless you tell Geary that it's a special folder by adding to your geary.ini file something like: archive_folder=Archive So IMO the only issues I can see are those related to the Labels vs Folders discussion: * why a normal (not special) folder is listed under Labels? * why folders created under Inbox have the Labels icon? (In reply to Federico Bruni from comment #2) > > It would be nice if the Labels folder would not appear at all if empty. This is already ticketed as bug 754802.
I'm planning on using IMAP NAMESPACE to solve this - if the server (e.g. Cyrus) reports that the "INBOX." is the personal namespace, then Geary should display mailboxes under INBOX alongside it instead. Otherwise if the server reports something else as the personal namespace, then mailboxes under INBOX will show up as being under the INBOX. I can't think of any other sane way of handling it, tbh. Will look into this as part of Bug 730712.
Resolving as obsolete all bugs that should be resolved by the sidebar redesign (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730712). I'd mark them as a duplicate, but bz won't let me :( Apologies for the noise.