Telling Thunderbird what folders to check for New Mail

January 31, 2006 9:49 AM

How do I tell Thunderbird what folders to check for new mail? Situation: I use procmail on my mail server to filter my incoming mail into about a dozen mailboxes. The mail ends up in ~/mail/new/mailboxes Thus, my mail never ends up in the default IMAP inbox. It seems Thunderbird only checks the inbox for new mail. Desired Outcome: I want Thunderbird to check my dozen different mailboxes for new mail. How can I do this?
posted by fief to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Right click on the mailbox in the tree, Properties, under General Information there's a checkbox for 'Check this folder for new messages'.
posted by xmutex at 9:51 AM on January 31, 2006

Click on the mailbox name (usually your primary email address) in the left pane to bring the big-iconed menu in the right pane. Read down to "Advanced Features", and click "Manage Folder Subscriptions".

Depending on your IMAP server setup and where in the filesystem your messages are, you may need to adjust the value contained in "View settings for this account" -> "Server Settings" -> "Advanced" -> "IMAP Server Directory"
posted by toxic at 10:35 AM on January 31, 2006

Check all IMAP folders for new mail
Thunderbird can download mail from all accounts when you start the program. Just add the following code to your user.js file:

// Download mail from all accounts on startup
user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);


This was found with a very basic Google search, by the way.
posted by drstein at 11:21 AM on January 31, 2006

Thank you xmutex, that was exactly what I wanted.

Toxic, I don't quite see how folder subscriptions are relevant here.

drstein, I don't want Thunderbird to check all (hmmm, let's see now, 600 some folders and 1.1gigs of data) of my mail. That takes quite awhile.

To abuse the thread a little, how do I tell thunderbird to not use its special "trash" folder. I want my deleted mail to stay in the folder it was deleted from until I expunge it.
posted by fief at 11:54 AM on January 31, 2006

To answer your new question: For each account, under Account Settings->Server Settings, change "When I delete a message:" to "Mark it as deleted". You can expunge by right-clicking on the mailbox and saying 'Compact this folder", or you can tell it to expunge on exit in the same configuration dialog.
posted by zsazsa at 12:17 PM on January 31, 2006

fief writes "Toxic, I don't quite see how folder subscriptions are relevant here. "

In a previous version of Thunderbird, my non-primary mail folders wouldn't show up, until I manually subscribed to them. I do exactly the same thing as you, with procmail filtering to a bunch of different folders. But if you're already seeing your folders in the left pane, and it's just not checking for new mails... then yes, folder subscriptions aren't useful.
posted by toxic at 1:27 PM on January 31, 2006