243677 - Consolidate menu items for accounts

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

Asa Dotzler recently wrote several entries about his experiences with Opera. 
While he enjoyed the rendering and the technical aspects of the program, he
extremely disliked the interface.  After sorting through the flaming his posts
generated, he did make some (in my opinion) constructive criticisms of Opera. 
On the linked topic, his comment 05.14 comment at 6:38pm was interesting because
of one of his suggestions: remove the Mail->New acc't menu item in favor of
Mail->Acc't settings (because creating new accounts is a rare occurrence).

Interestingly, nearly the same issue exists in Thunderbird.  We have
File->New->Account and Tools->Account Settings (which contains a New Account
button).  Granted, "Account Settings" doesn't suggest accounts can be created;
I'd suggest changing it to simply "Accounts", as the implied usage is still
nearly the same (similar to the future Tools->Extensions in Firefox).  If this
is done, File->New->Account can in my opinion be safely removed.

I realize this is a rather large UI change (even if it only affects two menu
items); it arguably makes creating accounts harder.  However, Thunderbird is
about optimizing the UI, and right now the UI is still rather bloated.  The post
says Firefox has ~50 menu items; a quick skim in Thunderbird shows 60 or so
top-level menu items (with a good number further nested - didn't skim).  If the
Tools menu can be further pared, Accounts should be nicely visible in the Tools
menu, and adding new accounts should be easy to find and do.

I can easily see this being marked as WONTFIX, but please consider:

1) *The* Mozilla QA guy (last I knew) thinks it makes sense for our competition.
2) This isn't adding UI bloat; it's destroying it.
3) Adding accounts is a very rare task; does it really need two entry points?
4) When I first set up Thunderbird I believe a New Account Wizard greeted me,
and most users don't need multiple accounts.

After I've filed this bug, I'm going to post a comment about it in the post.

Comment 1

[James Graham]

I think this would work better if File > New > Message became File > New Message
and Tools > Account Settings became Tools > Manage Accounts (which would fit
with the more general action oriented commands on that menu like 'Search
messages'). I don't quite know what should be done with the other items under
'New' though... ideally we could dispense with the entire submenu but I don't
quite know what do with the address book stuff.

Hopefully somewhere there lurks a general reorganisation plan for the menus :)

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment 0 is WFM - Tools | account settings is the current standard