Folder message counts not displaying on parent of nested folders

“Inherit” means that it inherits the setting from its parent mailbox. E.g., if you change a mailbox to counting flagged messages then its submailboxes do the same, because they are, by default, inheriting the setting.

To answer your question: It has never worked differently.

IMAP is a bit weird in the sense that a mailbox can both contain messages and other mailboxes (just like a file system) and this does not make it obvious how a count should work in all cases.

That said, providing a total count of submailboxes has been requested before and I took the time to implement a possible solution. When a mailbox has children then it'll now include a separate menu item name “Include Submailboxes”. You can try this by fetching the latest test release: Hold down ⌥ when clicking “Check Now” in the Software Update preferences pane.

[bulk edit]

Combined with “Include Submailboxes” feature, an awesome featurte would be the ability to visualise the messages contained directly by a mailbox (regular or smart) as if they were in a submailbox.

Currently, a mailbox directly containing 4 unread messages in it and 6 other unread messages in submailboxes, would be displayed like the below:

- Bulk (10)
  |- Alerts (2)
  |- Notifications (3)
  |- Newsletters (1)

This creates an uncessary mental burden because you can't immediately visualize the fact that the top mailbox itself also contains unread messages, because you need to do the math in your head.

Here's how the same thing could look like with the suggested feature :

- Bulk (10)
  |- .  (4)      ### A virtual submailbox which would refer to messages directly contained by the "Bulk" mailbox shown in the example.
  |- Alerts (2)
  |- Notifications (3)
     |- . (2)
     |- ISP (1)
  |- Newsletters (1)

In the above, the submailboxes labeled as '.' would be automatically displayed for each expanded mailbox that has submailboxes (regular or smart). It would not be needed otherwise.

BTW: I just made up the label ".". There might be a wiser choice available. The good things about the '.' (period) label are that 1) it stands out 2) draws a visual/semantic parallel to the Unix directory convention 3) It would be illegal to create an actual physical submailbox with that name on the server side.

Note that this feature would be quite useful even independently of the "counts" feature:

Often, it's desirable to be able to include messages from submailboxes in outline lists, but than it becomes impossible to distinguish the messages that are contained directly within that mailbox from those that are visually promoted (from submailboxes) into the outline list. The requested feature (which could be an option) would give us the best of both worlds :-)

I do realize that a somewhat similar effect can currently be achieved with a hack (by manually creating a smart submailbox equivalent to '.' which excludes all the messages in the other siblings), but it's quite tedious to create and maintain for every single situation. Also it's very fragile, and very slow...

Another workaround is to get into the habit of creating a regular subfolder, like "_OTHER_" for messages that don't really belong to any of the other existing subfolders... AND maintain a discipline to not put any messages directly into the parent folder... But that's error prone, as well as tedious...

This is the kind of thing automation excels in... :-)