129823 - Wire up F5 to 'Get New Mail'

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Peter Lockhart]

Request to have F5 wired up to 'Get Msgs' for current mail account. This
probably applies to M$ platforms only. 
I know that moving from Outlook, this feature was heavily used and makes a nice
shortcut which is inline with F5 reloading in the browser and used extensively
in normal Windows environment. It can co-exist with Ctrl+T which services all
platforms.

I'm sure not a hard feature to implement.

This is not a dupe of bug 79397

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

Makes sense to me, I think I even tried to use F5 once in mail.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

This has been in place for quite a while.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

This is not fixed in SeaMonkey, only in Thunderbird.
http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mail/base/content/mailWindowOverlay.xul#410 is the only place I find such a binding in relation to mail and that's Thunderbird-specific code.

Only one of this and bug 79397 can be implemented though, as there's only one F5 key.

Comment 4

[Karsten Düsterloh]

F5 for "Get New Messages" would be a bad choice since it violates the "usual"/common notion of "reload"...

Comment 5

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to comment #4)
> F5 for "Get New Messages" would be a bad choice since it violates the
> "usual"/common notion of "reload"...

So what you say is that Thunderbird made the wrong choice? Actually, I would have expected F5 in a newsgroup or in an IMAP folder to refresh with live content from the net, and "Get New Messages" actually does that, while "View" > "Reload" never did anything on anything I tried it at, it sounds like a no-op to me, while if I think carefully, in any other case than POP3 without the "Leave on server" setting, "Get New Messages" does exactly what I would expect from an equivalent to "Reload" in the browser.

Comment 6

[Karsten Düsterloh]

"Reloading" implies "updated version of the _same_ content".
Web pages usually don't change _completely_ on reload, they just add/alter a part of their content, but "Get New Messages" is getting whole new stuff (if at all)!

(In reply to comment #5)
> So what you say is that Thunderbird made the wrong choice?

Yes, exactly.

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

(In reply to comment #6)
> "Reloading" implies "updated version of the _same_ content".

Not really, it's "wahtever is on there now", which is often a new version, or in case of a webmail account, the it has all the new messages. ;-)

> Web pages usually don't change _completely_ on reload, they just add/alter a
> part of their content, but "Get New Messages" is getting whole new stuff (if at
> all)!

It just displays the current state of what's in a newsgroup, IMAP folder or feed right now. In case of accounts that download things locally without leaving copies on the server, it can be quite different, that's right, but one would need to do real UX testing to see if it's really that unexpected there.

Comment 8

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

There are messages, and more commonly RSS items, which can have dynamic HTML content, and I have once or twice wanted to reload the message I was viewing -- and there was no way to do so, other than switching to another message and then back.

Comment 9

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I'd opt for reloading the message when focus is on the message pane, and checking mail when it's on a folder.