IMAP Synchronization Status Unclear
There does not appear to be any visual or other indicator of when IMAP has fully synced, either on an account or folder basis. I have an IMAP Account with 25+GB of mail across several hundred folders and subfolders. If I check the box "Keep messages in all folders for this account on this computer" (as well as the "Synchronize all messages locally regardless of age", it can take many many days (as the server eventually throttles my bandwidth for a period of time). Naturally, I get all the headers pretty quickly, and can see that visually in the folder pane. But then I have to open Activity Manager and keep an eye on what it's doing. But there's really no way of knowing when it's done synchronizing for the account, or at a folder level (e.g. I can see the number of emails in a folder and the size of the folder in the folderpane, but all I can assume is that those are headers that were downloaded... I don't know if the actual message bodies have been downloaded unless I happen to see it in the activity manager.) Is there a way to get a visual on this, or a status somewhere?
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Why would you want to know.... it does not affect anything but search and you already know it is going to take the best part of a week.
Two reasons, one of which is immediate/practical, the other philosophical. 1) Immediate/Practical: I get involved with different companies from whom I get email accounts, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for a few years... some emails addresses span decades. Before those accounts "go away", I like to make a local backup so I can access that account's email via "Local Folders" (e.g. my "Local Folders" top level might look like "Trash, Outbox, Old_Account_A, Old_Account_B, Old_Account_C"). However, I have no way of *knowing* if all the email from an IMAP account has actually been downloaded locally. Whether or not I use ImportExportToolsNG, some other extension, or just copy the relevant folder from the ImapMail directory, I don't know if it's actually current on my harddrive... I might be missing email. So for the 25+GB IMAP account (on Office365), I have to log into Office 365 (e.g. their web portal), note that I have 25.46GB of email, and then look at the size of my "outlook.office365.com" folder in ImapMail on my hard drive and see if they are close in size. Activity Manager, doesn't really give me this kind of status, and at best I can infer status either by waiting long enough for it to do nothing for a long while or having it start downloading content. Neither option provides any certainty. 2) Philosophical: I suspect a lot of Thunderbird users are fairly technical and have complex setups. Surfacing more detailed status and more detailed activity on either Activity Manager or some other interface would be super helpful for debugging and generally knowing what's going on: i.e. what Thunderbird is doing besides "indexing messages" or "bringing a folder up to date", which is nice, but not the whole story. In past iterations of Thunderbird it would tell me there 34 things "on the queue", but nowhere could I see what was on the queue. At the time I had Thunderbird connected to six IMAP accounts and several CalDAV accounts and it would crash often and it was hard to debug. The queue would get smaller but the things coming off the queue weren't being report on Activity Manager. In either case, Thunderbird clearly "knows" this status, so surfacing it, at least at the account level, would seem like a nice thing to have. NB: I've been using Thunderbird since it first came out and am super grateful to everyone who keep it alive, so nothing herein should be taken as criticism.
If you use the import export tools, the server is checked to ensure the mail being exported is current according to the server. That is why exporting a supposedly local IMAP folder can take much longer than you would expect. It has extra overheads.
On your second point, I will beg to differ. I have doing this support gig for about 10 years now and Thunderbird users cover the whole gambit. From those who struggle with the most minor change and do not understand terms like hard drive and disk space and can give a technical description of their operating system as windows latest version, to the uber technical who think nothing of firing up a copy of Wireshark when the logging described here does not give them enough detail.
I do still get messages in the activity manager about downloading X of XX messages from what ever for POP mail accounts and others including IMAP accounts looking like this.
There are a number of outstanding activity manager bugs and enhancement requests, including some I have filed You are welcome to file your own. I personally think the activity manager needs love, but it has received very little in the past 10 years. This bug is the over all tracking bug to which all activity manager bugs are supposed to be linked. Note the referenced bugs numbers with a strikethough are completed.
