331069 - Usability problem with toggle columns (junk, flag/star, read/unread) in Thread pane - column attribute toggled when message's row is clicked and dragged

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Marian]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Version 1.5 (20051201)

(I installed Thunderbird on my friends PC and showed it to her. Later I sat next to her watching her use it and explaining some of the functions to her. Here is one phenomenon I have noticed two times on two different days:)

The user has the two columns "flag" and "junk" activated in the pane. When trying to drag a mail from the current folder into a sub-folder, the user targeted the mouse pointer exactly to the junk column. When clicking, the mail was marked as junk. Due to the users settings, the mail was moved to the junk folder. For the user, this was obviously completely unexpected and unexplicable. 

Guesses:

I have no idea why my friend wants to pick up the item with the mouse pointer exactly positioned on the "junk" column. Maybe it's due to the fact that it shows a solid dot instead of text, as the other columns do. Maybe she expects that, when pointing the mouse to text, she would be able to mark text, but not be able to drag the list item, an thus points to the more solid item.

Suggestion:

The observed problem may obviously also to the columns "Junk", "Read/Unread", "Flag" and 

If the toggle function ("mark as junk", "flag", "mark unread") of the specific column wouldn't act on click, but on release of the mouse button, it would be possible to drag the item by handling it at that column.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #0)
> The user has the two columns "flag" and "junk" activated in the pane. When
> trying to drag a mail from the current folder into a sub-folder, the user
> targeted the mouse pointer exactly to the junk column. When clicking, the mail
> was marked as junk. Due to the users settings, the mail was moved to the junk
> folder. For the user, this was obviously completely unexpected and
> unexplicable. 

Not only that: If different message is selected, clicking on a toggle-column 
for a message and dragging it ends up dragging the selection rather than the clicked-on message.  Note that clicking on one of these columns specifically does not change the selection, and that behavior is desirable.


Possible workarounds for the Junk case: Is your friend ever using the junk column for its intended purpose?  If not, she could simply remove the column from the display.  Alternately, she could turn off the automatic "move/delete 
on Mark Junk" setting.

Comment 2

[Marian]

(In reply to comment #1)
> 
> Possible workarounds for the Junk case: Is your friend ever using the junk
> column for its intended purpose?  If not, she could simply remove the column
> from the display.  Alternately, she could turn off the automatic "move/delete 
> on Mark Junk" setting.

Mark, thanks for the reply. Yes, my friend is using that column in the "toggle" way.

But let's not speak about my friend. Since that column is visible by default, we can guess that the majority of the users have it displayed all the time and never disable it.

Again, this also applies to "Read/Unread" and "Flag".

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

on Mac too?

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

on Mac too?

Comment 5

[Marian]

Sorry, but unfortunately I don't own a mac, so I cannot test this.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

this isn't fundamentally a junk bug, so removing from junktracker

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

When trying to drag a mail from the current folder into a sub-folder, the user targeted the mouse pointer exactly to the junk column.

I don't understand how this can be accomplished do you? The target folder's columns is not in the display.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I don't believe we would change this behavior