[Dovecot] Imap notifications in IDLE

[Jay Levitt]

Curtis Maloney wrote:
> Jarosław Przybyłowicz wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> could you please tell me if there is a way, to make dovecot notify my 
>> mail client of new messages in inbox subfolders?
>> I'm using fdm to fetch mails into maildir and proper subfolders. So 
>> far, when idleing mozilla gets a notification when new message arrives 
>> in INBOX, but if mail is fetched into other folder I have to click on 
>> it to see if there is a new message. I've checked thunderbird imap log 
>> to check if this is dovecot or TB issue.
>> Is there any way to force dovecot to monitor other folders?
> 
> Right click the folder, select Properties.  In the 'General Information' 
> tab of the window that appears, select 'Check this folder for new 
> messages'.
> 
> Do this for each folder your LDA delivers into.
> 
> Really, it's the only way to do it, and it means an extra IMAP 
> connection per folder.
> 

I have to wrestle with this every time I set up Thunderbird.  I can't 
remember how I finally got it working.  But, as I remember:

- As others said.. set "Check this folder for new messages", AND set 
"mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new" in Config editor. (Though I seem to 
have the latter set to the default "false".. hmm.)

- You might also need to increase mail.imap.max_cached_connections; 
otherwise TB will only monitor the folder until it needs to close the socket 
to maintain that max.

- I think you need to "visit" each folder at least once after opening TB, or 
it won't look for new messages (except Inbox).  Obviously, that means you 
want to keep TB running all the time.  I see that I've manually set the 
preference mail.startup.enabledMailCheckOnce to "true"; that may be the 
workaround for this.

- There used to be a bug such that even if you did all the above, TB still 
wouldn't check for new messages.  There was an add-on that fixed this - 
something like "no, really check for new mail".  I think this bug got fixed 
in 1.2, but I can't remember anymore.

- Play with other config settings.  Fun strings to search for: "idle", 
"new", "max", "check", "biff".

- Try TB3 beta.  Can't be worse!