... view a IMAP folder tree?

[markus]

Hello,
today I started trying AquaMail and it looks very good.
It knows to handle standard folders (sent, trash, etc) even when their name shown on the client is different (like "gesendet" in german  -> "sent" ).
And it lets me select what fiolders should be shown on the client.

But:
How can I show imap folders in some kind of tree view?
What I have seen, there is only a "dotted" folder list (like xxx.yyy.zzz). This gives only a flat list with all folders.

With a real tree view one could collapse or expand a level showing up or hiding all sub- and sub-sub-folders within the selected item.

Markus

[Kostya Vasilyev]

There is no tree view. It's a flat list.

[markus]

Is there a chance this will come some day?

We have a deeply nested structure of folders and subfolders with a total of ~ 6.800 folders. Obviously here a flat list is not the right thing.

Markus 

[Kostya Vasilyev]

6,800 folders?

That's waaaay outside of anything I've considered. A few folders, dozens maybe, but this...

Just like this other gentleman wanted to have 50+ folders in push (IMAP IDLE) mode.

The only things I can think of are:

1 - Install Outlook or Thunderbird on your Android device if you can

2 - Contact me at kmansoft / gmail for a refund.

[markus]

Well, this number may sound somewhat ridiculous. I must admit I was surprised myself after running a "find -type d"  over our cyrus mail spool directory.

But it is a nested structure!  One "year" folder for every year since 1997, each containing ~100 subfolders for projects. And each project has 3 subfolders (sent, received and administrative mails with restricted access). The rest are user folders.

We have Thunderbird on our desktops, but AFAIK there is no Thunderbird for Android, or is it?

BTW: Aqua-Mail does not show public folders when (automatic) IMAP-prefix is "INBOX." Public folders reside on the same leve as "INBOX." Aqua-Mail should not only show folders unter the IMAP-prefix but also those with an empty prefix.

Just like Thunderbird on desktops does.

May be this problem can be circumvented by creating two accounts for the same mail-server. One with an empty IMAP-prefix and one with the standard prefix.

Markus

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Yes, I understand that it's a nested structure, and that it seems perfectly reasonable to you.

But this number of folders does not seem reasonable to me -- and I only mean it for this mail app (AquaMail), this developer (myself), etc.

AFAIK, there is no Thunderbird for Android.

----

About IMAP namespaces. To my knowledge, the only folder which is a special case (lives outside any configured namespace) is the main "default" INBOX.

For others, if you are using a namespace (either manual or automatic setting) -- then you're telling Aqua to only look inside that namespace.

So let's say you have:

Inbox
INBOX.folderA
INBOX.folderB
folderC

and the namespace is "INBOX", then in Aqua you'll see:

Inbox (the folder, not the namespace)
folderA
folderB
(folderC will not appear)

And in fact, Aqua's "LIST" command will then be:

LIST "" "INBOX.*"

where INBOX is the namespace (not the Inbox folder... confusing? to me, yes).

There is no reason for Aqua to go outside the namespace, and it's not desirable to do so (who knows how many thousands of folders there are, at the root level).

Now, Aqua only supports one (first) personal namespace. Sorry. To my knowledge, K9 Mail is the same way.

[markus]

Hello,

first of all, thank you for your patience. As you may have noticed, my experiences regarding IMAP come from desktops with Thunderbird. Newbie on Android / smartphones.

There is a good reason to look outside the IMAP-prefix also. Folders within and below INBOX. are private folders, belonging to the user logged in. But there may be many addditional folders called shared folders (available for everyone, but ACLs may apply).

[Excursion:
If you have the chance to logon to an IMAP server with an administrative account (i.e. user cyrus in cyrus-imapd) you will notice folders named "user.{names}.{subfolders}". These are the user's folders. If you logon as a regular user "xyz", the folder "user.xyz" will be shown as INBOX. And "user.xyz.abc" will be shown as INBOX.abc.
EndOfExcursion]

It would be fine if AquaMail some day is able to access shared folders also. The access itself shouldn't be a major issue, the problem is the handling of the folder tree. For every level you have to store what sublevels are "open" (expanded) and what are not (collapsed). Just like Thunderbid does.

I have seen (but not used myself) something like that on an iPhone: Wiping left shows a screen with the folder tree.

Markus

[Kostya Vasilyev]

>> There is a good reason to look outside the IMAP-prefix also. Folders within and below INBOX. are private folders, belonging to the user logged in.

Yes, the personal namespace. The NAMESPACE RFC allows for more than one, but Aqua only looks in the first one.

>> But there may be many addditional folders called shared folders (available for everyone, but ACLs may apply).

The roots of those should be returned by the server as shared namespace(s)... But that's moot, as Aqua doesn't look at shared namespace(s) right now, and I won't be able to even consider that for a long time, if ever.

A hierarchical folder view and access to shared namespaces are both great things, no doubt, that I can (enthusiastically) agree with.