Still having problems...
- I removed the 3.7.1 install (keeping my ~./claws-mail folder intact), downloaded and installed (via dpkg) the 3.6.1 binaries, without incident. Fired up claws-mail, saw my accounts and messages; had same exact results. First account/mailbox is fine; second one having the same issue as described above. (Also, still having the "text of all non-selected items in both the Folder View pane and Message List panes are greyed out" issue, which was not present with the original 3.5 client.)
- Then uninstalled 3.6.1, moved my ~./claws-mail folder elsewhere, and did a fresh install of 3.7.1 (via apt) and started completely fresh - set up my account (IMAP) again, etc. The first fetch worked - downloaded all my messages; but then I was back to being unable to fetch any new messages, as described above.
- After gluing the hair back to my head, and waiting a day, I went to my other computer, also running Crunchbang, and installed 3.7.1 via apt. Set it up for the same account. And.... same problem(s) are happening.
At this point I can think of only a couple possible reasons for this:
1. There is a fundamental incompatibility between #! and claws-mail. This seems extremely unlikely. However I can imagine that this might have something to do with the ghosted-text issue. I've tried changing every font-, color-, or display-related setting in Claws, to no avail. So I'm wondering if some system setting or Appearance configuration might be affecting this aspect of Claws.
2. The problem has something to do with the IMAP server that this account profile is set up for. Well it just so happens that it's an Exchange 2007 server. I'd be surprised if the cause of my problems is, say, something about the server's IMAP configuration, because my company has a lot of other people using non-Windows mails clients to access their mail. A couple of them are hardcore anti-Microsofties, with a lot of pull internally, so if there were any misconfiguration issues I think they would have been addressed. That being said, I wonder if there's an incompatibility between Claws-mail, and MS's probably-not-100%-standards-compliant IMAP implementation.
I'm leaning in the direction of #2. The other IMAP account I've had set up in my various claws-mail installations, does not connect to an MS Exchange server, and I've had no problems with it.