700649 - Absolutely no feedback on network errors

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 227551

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

My free mail provider introduced a problem with their pop3 servers last night.  I wasn't able to track this down easily because there were no way in Thunderbird to figure out why I wasn't receiving any emails (bug 700448).

I'm missing some visible log or history of network access problems in the front end.  In my case above, there also was nothing in the error console, not that it would be something a common user usually looks at to check what's going on.


I would like to propose to have an icon that goes red or whatever when something unexpected with the network went wrong that opens perhaps a new tab that gives a log of erroneous attempts and access to detailed info about each.

Comment 1

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

This is quit major issue for me.  E.g. mail.mozilla.com seems to be down for a long time but Thunderbird didn't inform me in any way about it...

Are there any plans to fix this?  Should I take the bug and start working on it?  (Though, I have a tun of other work to do..)

Comment 2

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

Since this seems to be bugging you (no pun intended), it would probably be best if you took the bug and started working on it!  If nothing else, I would really appreciate it!

Were you thinking of adding a red state to the network status icon in the bottom left, or do you think that's not discoverable enough?

Thanks,
Blake.

Comment 3

[David :Bienvenu]

You should be seeing sliding alerts telling you we were unable to connect to mail.mozilla.com - but yeah, some annotation in the ui could be nice. Blake, I don't think a global state is sufficient, since it's only a single server that's down/unreachable, so the annotation might be better on the account in the folder pane - though you could argue that adding a red state and then some ability to find out which account(s) that red state applied to would be sufficient.

Comment 4

[Honza Bambas (:mayhemer)]

I'm happy to work on this, but not until Christmas.

My first though is to add a red icon to the status bar beside the progress and the informational field (where you can see Connecting bla bla.. when pressing F5).  After click on it, view in a dialog, new tab, whatever, the list of errors, maybe coalesced like "Connect to mail.mozilla.com times out since 5.12.2011 till now (_details_)".  Details would expand, a bit like phone call history on iPhone, showing attempt counts, dates, exact errors, whatever more data makes sense.

This list should be also accessible from the menu, like error console is.

The icon should persist for the time we are not able to connect any of the accounts and disappear after all accounts had been successfully contacted.

Comment 5

[MOZZOLINO]

What is the status on this? I also see this as a major usablility issue - my provider had some network problems on a mailaccount that is very well protected from spam, so it is normal that this account does not get emails for a few days (yes, this exists!). I had no way to understand if there is some network connection problem or if I have no emails - thunderbird is really bad in this situation and gives no easy way to understand what is wrong. This must be fixed, as it leads to constant uncertainty about if there are really no mails or if the network is broken again - very annoying. It basically means, that you can not trust TB because it does not communicate transparently. 

I now regularly send emails to myself when I have the feeling that the network might be down - totally annoying. 

Please, Thunderbird developers, take a look at Ritlabs TheBat - they have a great logging feature that can be made visible for every login process and that gives you protocol level log of what is going on - getting this kind of insight is near to impossible in thunderbird.

Thanks for your attention.

Comment 6

[MOZZOLINO]

Feature should be relized as: easy accessible protocol log window and last log line visible in status bar.