Useful tip for those using Thunderbird/IMAP for mail

[skaven]

I'm sure most of you don't have this problem, but if you do, then I've found a solution.

My problem was that I use procmail to filter my incoming e-mail on the server (as opposed to using Thunderbird's mail filtering features). However, this meant that when Thunderbird started up, it would only check for new mail in the main "INBOX" folder. I had to click every IMAP folder to make it check for new mail. Very aggravating.

I had searched in vain all over google groups and found nothing, and was about to tackle the gargantuan task of learning the mozilla source tree well enough to patch Thunderbird to get this feature, when I happened across a post in the Mozilla newsgroups that said to add the following to about:config (or just add it to prefs.js while Thunderbird is not running)

user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);

That did the trick! Now when Thunderbird starts up it checks all my IMAP folders (not just INBOX) for new mail.

It's a shame that this is an undocumented preference. I wish it was somewhere in the configuration panel for Thunderbird.