Mozilla Thunderbird: Subscribe nested folders and subfolders

Well I’ve been trying to organize my mailbox – basically create folders/subfolders and organize my emails for quite some time now. Today I finally managed to get some time and decided to go ahead with this seemingly simple activity. I’mean how difficult is it to create folders/subfolders and move emails right?

Now I have MS Exchange Server at work which has been IMAP-enabled so that I can access my mailbox from my phone and from Thunderbird (on my Linux box). I organized all my emails in folders and subfolders (nested upto 2-3 levels) using MS Outlook at work and later when I tried to access my mailbox using Thunderbird, I realized that it was not displaying all my folders and subfolders.

So I go to my Mail Account Settings to explicitly subscribe the folders/subfolders. That’s when I found out that it was simply fetching/displaying the top-level folders and the immediate subfolders (nested 1 level). It was not displaying the nested subfolders within other subfolders. So in the example below, only folders X and A were being displayed while B and C were not.

X
 |___ A
      |___ B
           |___ C

So in the time-tested manner I googled for some answer and came across quite a few forums where people have faced the same problem.

http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/imap_sub_sub_folders_do_not_appear_in_subscribe_window

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=55577

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=55134

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showpost.php?p=462865&postcount=27

I didn’t find much help till I came across – http://kb.mozillazine.org/IMAP:_advanced_account_configuration

So this is how I fixed the problem:

• Remove your mail account (e.g. mail.xxx.com) and recreate it just to be on the safe side. You can skip this too.. I just didn’t
• Right click on your mail account folder and go to the Mail Server Settings i.e.
  Account Settings –> mail.xxx.com –> Server Settings



• Now press the button “Advanced” to view the “Advanced Account Settings”. Uncheck the option “Show only subscribed folders” and press “OK“.

  

  Now the moment you connect to your mail server, this will fix two things:

  1. You won’t have to explicitly subscribe each folder/subfolder
  2. All folders and nested subfolders get fetched and displayed automatically

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