The mailwatch panel plugin displays a red overlay icon when it fails to contact the mailbox it is monitoring, for example when network connectivity is lost. Once connectivity has been restored, the plugin resumes checking for mail but fails to clear the red icon.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 4747 ***
Would a fix for this be accepted if it were submitted? I'm constantly getting bitten by this bug, and might try to fix it if a patch would be accepted. Since none of the IMAP servers I use has 100.00000% uptime, every mailwatch instance I run always has a red dot. Since the red dot is always there regardless of of the current host/connect status, it's useless and gets ignored. Recently that meant that when something actually _did_ go wrong, and mail wasn't getting checked on one server, I didn't find out about it for several days. The mailwatch instance for the failing server was showing a red dot, but so were all the other ones that were working fine.