1061026 - When Deleting a Draft, no "Are You Sure?"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 308063

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[Steve Lawson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I was looking at a Draft in the "Drafts" folder using the Message Pane.  While reading the content, I forgot I was reading it in the Message Pane and not in the Editor and saw some text I wanted to delete -- so, I hit the Delete button on my keyboard.  Bam!  The whole thing went away!  No warning!  No save!!!  No "Are you sure?"  Dang!


Actual results:

The whole dang Draft vanished with no apparent way to retrieve it!


Expected results:

It should have prompted me with a prominent "Are you sure you want to delete this?" message!  Then I would have weathered my "senior moment" with little grief!!!

Comment 1

[Steve Lawson]

I was able to find the deleted Draft in the Trash folder.  I had looked for it before posting this "bug" but tried again.  It was difficult to find because it has existed as a Draft for about a month, and so was lost in the maelstrom of mail that currently sits in the Trash.  But, it occurred to me I could search on the name of the intended recipient, and thus the deleted draft was revealed!

But, still, it would be a nice feature to throw up an Are You Sure? message.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Steve Lawson from comment #0)
> I was looking at a Draft in the "Drafts" folder using the Message Pane. 
> While reading the content, I forgot I was reading it in the Message Pane and
> not in the Editor and saw some text I wanted to delete -- so, I hit the
> Delete button on my keyboard.  Bam!  The whole thing went away!  No warning!
> No save!!!  No "Are you sure?"  Dang!

Steve, thank you for sharing your user story. Being one of the key UX contributors for Thunderbird, I agree with your view that this user error can easily occur which makes this a case of ux-error-prevention. So as you say in your expected result, in case there's text selected in a draft message shown in message reader, and user accidentally presses delete believing to edit the text, we should warn. I've laid out my reasons for that view quite clearly in Bug 308063 Comment 5.

However, there's a competing behaviour where in terms of ux-efficiency, some power users want to be able to delete the current message in message reader by just pressing DEL key regardless of focus, e.g. after copying some text or replying to selection. Both of these counter-scenarios imho don't usually apply to draft messages, so perhaps that's something which should be emphasized in favour of implementing a better behaviour for this special case.