[ale] Eudora OSE - maybe Thunderbird - IMAP Buggy

[Ron Frazier]

Hello all,

I've been having various discussions on and off list about organizing 
email.  A number of you have offered suggestions, which I appreciate.  
I'm going to try to reply to some of those individually.  However, I 
wanted to pass along some test results that I got while experimenting 
with Eudora OSE, which is based on the Thunderbird codebase.

I did some testing on Eudora OSE and found that the email properties 
propagation through IMAP is buggy.  Since Eudora OSE is based on 
Thunderbird, this may affect it too.  The messages and folders do appear 
properly, and replicate to the second machine, but the message 
properties do not.

I set up a test email account on the server for my domain at 1and1.com 
and forwarded my regular messages to it.  I set up accounts on two PC's 
with Eudora OSE to log into this email by IMAP.  Then I let some 
messages accumulate.

For testing, I decided to use the Read / Unread status, the color or 
tag, and the priority.  The permutations are:
read / unread - 2 options
black / blue - 2 options (I just used one extra color for testing.)
normal / high / extra high priority - 3 options (I didn't test the two 
low priorities.)

This means there are 12 total permutations.

I went about setting 12 messages each with one of these combinations of 
features on PC 1, so every message had a different combination.  Then I 
waited to see what would happen while I observed PC 2.

The priority is not propagated across the IMAP at all, at least, with 
this email client and this email server.  The color appears to propagate 
properly to the second PC.  The read / unread status is buggy.  I 
observed several times that the messages I had marked read on PC 1 would 
spontaneously become unread again on PC 1, whereas they should have 
become read on PC 2.

So, at this point, I don't trust Eudora OSE to handle my IMAP email 
properly.  I use those features all the time to organize messages in my 
POP folders.

For the moment, I guess I'll stick to POP.  Again, thanks to all that 
provided suggestions.  By the way, the bugzilla site for Thunderbird has 
6000 bug reports.  That's kind of scary.

Sincerely,

Ron

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com