up vote 5 down vote favorite
1
share [g+] share [fb]

I'm using Thunderbird with Gmail IMAP and there's this "Subscribe" option for folders. What does that mean?

link|improve this question
73% accept rate
feedback

3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

The folders you subscribe to are the ones displayed by Thunderbird. It subscribes every folder it finds when you first setup the account and any folder you add through Thunderbird is automatically subscribed as well. I guess that option is there so if you were to add a folder through another application or a webmail-ish app and you wanted that new folder to be displayed as well you can just turn it on.

Maybe this link will clarify things. Here's a quote:

Your IMAP email client (eg Thunderbird) will display the folders in your account to which you are "subscribed".

Generally, this will be all of the folders in your account, and only the folders in your account. However, in some situations you may find that there are folders in your account that do not appear in Thunderbird, or folders that appear in Thunderbird that are not in your account. This can be fixed by subscribing to (or unsubscribing from) the offending folders.

link|improve this answer
How is this different from going to File->Offline->Offline Settings->Select folders for offline use? This doesn't seem to be the same as subscribing (at least as suggested by the UI), so I guess it must have a different meaning. – obvio171 Oct 27 '09 at 18:34
1  
I edited to clarify. If you were to login to your IMAP account through a web portal and create a folder then Thunderbird would not even display it until you subscribed to it. – djhowell Oct 27 '09 at 18:53
1  
Don't forget that you may also want to turn subscriptions off - one of the benefits of IMAP is that state is (in theory) maintained on the server so you might not, on a mobile device or on a laptop (particularly a netbook) want to subscribe to folders that potentially have a high volume of traffic – Murph Oct 27 '09 at 21:14
feedback
up vote 6 down vote

This is due of the peculiarities of the IMAP protocol. Strangely enough, the authors of that protocol not only thought about email when the dreamed it up, the also thought about usenet and newsgroups. The newsgroups of the usenet for a large hierarchy with thousands and thousands of groups. The original aim of IMAP was to support having the complete hierarchy available through your IMAP account. Of course, you wouldn't want all those groups to show up in your mail client, thus the concept of folder subscriptions was added to the protocol.

If I remember correctly, Thunderbird also has an option to simply show you all your available folders without going through the motions of subscribing to single folders. It has nothing to do with offline use or synchronization.

If you want to know more about the IMAP protocol, check out the corresponding Wikipedia article. You can also try to read the corresponding RFC which makes up the protocol and which is full of examples concerning usenet newsgroups (and has only a few examples that related directly to email).

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

I believe that it allows you to subscribe to a folder on the server, there by syncing the contents of whats on the server with what's in the Thunderbird client.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.