Effectiveness of folder filtering

[Dave Abrahams]

on Thu Jul 19 2012, Dave Abrahams <dave-AT-boostpro.com> wrote:

> I just found the following in my offlineimap output:
>
>   BoostProRemoteReadOnly:INBOX -> BoostProLocal
>
> What's baffling about this is that the BoostProRemoteReadOnly
> repository had the following settings:
>
>   folderincludes = ['[Gmail]/All Mail']
>   idlefolders = %(folderincludes)s
>   folderfilter = lambda foldername: False
>
> Which, as far as I can tell, *ought* to prevent it from syncing INBOX
> from there.  Am I missing something about how this is supposed to work?

Update:

Having trolled through the code, I see that folderincludes doesn't
*necessarily* work as advertised.  At least, if you put something in
folderincludes that was seen, but ruled out, by folderfilter, the same
folder will appear twice in the list of folders, once with sync_this set
to False and again with it set to true.  That seemd suspicious, so I
switched to a more traditional setup that used only folderfilter and no
folderincludes:

  idlefolders = ['[Gmail]/All Mail']
  folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername in %(idlefolders)s

But unfortunately, it didn't seem to cure the problem:

 Syncing INBOX: Gmail -> MappedIMAP
 Copy message 65245 (1 of 3) BoostProRemoteReadOnly:INBOX -> BoostProLocal
 Copy message 65246 (2 of 3) BoostProRemoteReadOnly:INBOX -> BoostProLocal
 Copy message 65247 (3 of 3) BoostProRemoteReadOnly:INBOX -> BoostProLocal

I have two repositories talking to the same IMAP server and account.
BoostProRemoteReadOnly is supposed to deal with the "All Mail" folder
and BoostProRemote is supposed to deal with INBOX.  Could that be
related to the issue?

Hmm... looking further, the only place that a /local/ folder's sync_this
flag is checked is in accounts.syncfolder(), which is only used, AFAICT,
by idle support.  It's called in one place, by
imapserver.IdleThread.dosync().  Shouldn't the remote folder's sync_this
flag be checked as well before allowing such a sync to proceed?  And
shouldn't the local folder's sync_this flag be checked for ordinary
(non-idle) syncs?

I just added some code to look for that case; we'll see if it prints a
warning and/or makes any difference.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com