I recently found a problem with Thunderbird that despite an age spent Googling seemed to have no solution. The funny (or actually not so funny) thing was that it was something that I felt must be possible or the mail client would be fundamentally broken.

The feature that I thought was missing was the ability to make Thunderbird re-query the server for new folders that had be added by other mail clients. You see when you create an IMAP account it automatically adds all the folders it finds to a subscribed list. If you add a new folder though Thunderbird it automatically adds it to the subscribed list as well. The problem comes when you add a folder in another mail client (or web mail client). You see Thunderbird detects the addition of the folder but doesn't add it to the subscribed list.

This failure to add the new folder to the subscribed list would be so bad if a) every other mail client I have ever used didn't automatically subscribe to new folders b) if there was some sort of notification that Thunderbird had found new folders and c) if the settings that need changing weren't so damn obscure.

So if you have missing folders that you know you have created and want to subscribe to them have a look under:

File > Subscribe...

Yes would would have thought this would appear under the account settings wouldn't you but no it's under the file menu.

How could the Thunderbird team fix this. Well a good first pass would be to automatically subscribe to new folders when they are discovered. If the user wants to unsubscribe they can always do so. Failing that if for some unknown reason there is a technical problem with auto-subscription at least pop up a window asking the user if they would like to subscribe to newly found folders.

While I'm having a bit of a rant I complain about the way that when you uninstall Thunderbird it leaves setting and other information lying around. In my quest solve the above problem I actually uninstalled and reinstalled Thunderbird. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that despite deleting my email account, uninstalling and deleting the Thunderbird folder under Program Files (yes I was working on Windows at the time) it still remembered my subscribed folder list when I reinstalled it. I presume there are registry entries that aren't getting removed. Why?