I put an empty folder in the Trash using the latest version of Thunderbird. It was named 2020 and had been created when I accidentally archived a message using their keyboard shortcut. Last night, I emptied the Trash (within RB 7), and the few messages that had been in there were gone, but the folder remained. It was clearly a subfolder of Trash, as the disclosure triangle was visible. I then realized that I had to click the three dots next to the folder itself and delete it that way. The folder disappeared from RB7. It’s not exactly intuitive.
As a side effect of that, however, folders removed using RB7 still appear within the folder hierarchy in Thunderbird, but they are grayed out.
I just ran another test, creating and deleting another folder entirely within RB7. When I deleted it, it vanished as expected from RB7, but it became another phantom folder in Thunderbird.
What’s causing this, and is there a way to make them as “gone” as RB7 thinks they are?
Emptying the trash has never removed folders placed in there and this isn’t a Runbox 7 bug. Some people use folders in Trash to sort deleted messages until they want to delete them. You could request this as a feature enhancement from us, but changing that behaviour could be risky given the long history of this behaviour. I hope that explains what is going on.
No, I understand that, and would actually find the existing behavior useful, even though the utility of it would never have occurred to me without your explanation.
However, can you provide a way to expunge the resulting “ghost folders” from my tree? I can’t get them to disappear, which is extremely annoying. That is an enhancement I would like to see, since they are gone as far as RB7 shows.
See attached to see what I mean. Yes, I can collapse the Trash, but it doesn’t feel empty. They also remain visible in the Thunderbird Subscribe interface, but without checkboxes.
In Thunderbird do you have the option for subscribed folders turned on. This looks like the folders were previously subscribed to and Thunderbird shows them as “ghost” folders when it can’t find them. If you turn off subscribed folders so that Thunderbird shows exactly what is in your account I think these folders should disappear.
The folders in question can neither be subscribed to nor unsubscribed from, because there are no checkboxes next to them. As you can see by the attached screenshot, I only have the stock folders subscribed. Do you mean that I should temporarily unsubscribe even from them?
Clicking the Refresh button does nothing, unfortunately. The “ghost” folders still return.
I meant that you could turn off folder subscriptions entirely unless you feel the need for them. It’s a bit of an old fashioned idea but can be useful where IMAP folders are on a shared system between users.
I had never known of that setting’s existence until now. And when I turned it off, something very interesting happened: the ghost folder that had been at the root level (“test3” in the screenshot above) did vanish on relaunch.
But the two folders that were in the Trash remained – until I quit and relaunched a second time!
I have no idea why that second relaunch worked, but it did. Thank you!
