103875 - Downloading attachments should open a separate progress dialog

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Ben Ruppel]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:0.9.5+)
Gecko/20011009
BuildID:    2001100903

Currently, status and downloading of message attachments is handled by the
mailnews 3-pane window.  This can be a problem, since A) one would like to do
other things with mailnews while downloading a big attachment, and it is easy to
loose track of the download in progress, and B) if one exits mailnews, the
download is halted and you are left with an incomplete file.

I think it would be totally appropriate to give downloading messages their own
dialog (like the ones the browser uses), allowing them to at least seem to
happen independently of the main mailnews window.  These dialogs would remain
open if mailnews was closed, making sure downloads were completed.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.Start downloading a big attachment, or several smaller ones
2.Do other stuff in Mailnews
3.or exit mailnews immediately

Actual Results:  It isn't very clear when your files are done downloading.  If
you exit mailnews, the file will be present, but it will be incomplete and
corrupted.

Expected Results:  There should be a clear way of keeping track of download
progress.

If this bug is rejected, perhaps I should file another bug to give a warning if
the file isn't finished downloading and you try to exit mailnews.  I'll also
file another one to not place a file at its destination until the download is
complete.

Comment 1

[Alex Bishop]

Mail attachment downloads could fit nicely in the proposed download manager 
(bug 102477) that Netscape is planning for MachV (Netscape 6.5).

This may be a duplicate, so I'm leaving it UNCONFIRMED.

Comment 2

[Ben Ruppel]

True, true, but for some reason I think downloading attachments from an IMAP
server (oops, I forgot that in my previous descriptions) is fundamentally
different from ftp or http downloading.

Comment 3

[Alex Bishop]

Even if downloading from an IMAP server is fundamentally different, I don't see 
why mail attachment downloads can't be put in the proposed download manager. 
The people over at bug 102477 seem to like the idea anyway.

Comment 4

[Ben Ruppel]

Cool!  Makes sense anyway.  

Comment 5

[Quinn Yost (mythdraug)]

Should this depend on bug 124865?

Comment 6

[Anders Åge Larsen]

Since this bug was reported, a newer version of Mozilla (1.0 RC1) has been
released. Reporter, please can you check to see whether this
bug is still present in a recent build (Moz1-RC1 or a new nightly build). If
this bug does not occur please can you resolve the report?

Comment 7

[Ben Ruppel]

This bug is not fixed in RC1.

Comment 8

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

Does the download manager solve this problem?

pi

Comment 9

[Arno Roefs]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.0) Gecko/20020530
Build: 2002053012

Not fixed yet, and it's quite annoying, not at all just an enhancement I think.

Comment 10

[Peter Bartecki]

We really need that feature.. and not only for IMAP accounts but for all of them.
And not only for attachements but for emails first of all. It's specially
annoying for people on slow modem connection and this progress bar or better
"separate progress window" keeps them online/alive.. 

Let's change description to: "[RFE]Downloading mail should open a separate
progress dialog"

 If I can I'd recommend making this separate progress dialog configurable (as do
not show this windows *ever* again).. so folks with one of those fast
DSL/whatever links and other_Who_don't need it might turn it off.

Comment 11

[Ben Ruppel]

Peter, please file your RFE as a separate bug, downloading attachments and
downloading email in general are distinct enough to warrant two bugs.

Comment 12

[Peter Bartecki]

Here we go then: bug 146237 has been here since May. I do not think we need
another bug to cover that, do we?

Comment 13

[Brant Gurganus]

[RFE] is deprecated in favor of severity: enhancement.  They have the same meaning.

Comment 14

[Kenan]

*** Bug 246554 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

I expect this is WONTFIX but who knows?

Comment 16

[[e-mail]]

Personally I'd like to see this in SeaMonkey but if Thunderbird don't want the equivalent (they're currently using the toolkit download manager so they don't get progress dialogs at all) then that might make implementing it tricky.

Comment 17

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

In thunderbird the toolkit download manager dialog does pop up some times, when doing save-as for bigger attachments (haven't figured out exactly when).