1366204 - Sending a draft created on a different PC results in TB using wrong "Sent" folder

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 394216

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Malte Wetz]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170504105526

Steps to reproduce:

General setup:

- 2 PCs on a network, accessing the same local IMAP server (Courier IMAP 4.10.0 on Ubuntu 16.04.2).

- Both PCs using TB 52.1.1 on MS Windows (one has Win10 Pro, the other has Win7 Pro).

- Each PC has two e-mail accounts on the IMAP server.
  * One shared one for the company itself ([e-mail])
  * And one for the individual employee working on the PC ([e-mail] and [e-mail]).
  * On both PCs, the shared account (info@...) is set to be the default account.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Joebob begins to write an e-mail for the shared account (info@...). He saves the mail as draft. It gets stored in the "Drafts" folder of the info-Account.

2. Marysue (who is Joebob's superior and wants to look over everything before it gets actually sent) opens the draft from that shared account on her PC.

3. Marysue has no objections and sends the mail from her PC. She does not change anything and keeps the From: header as "info@...".



Actual results:

The mail gets stored in the "Sent" folder of her personal e-mail account (marysue@...). She now has to manually drag it into the "Sent" folder of the shared account (info@...) where it belongs.


Expected results:

The mail should have been stored in the "Sent" folder of the shared account (info@...). That was the From: header of the mail and that was also the default account setting on her system.

Possible explanation:

When opening a draft that was saved on a different PC, Thunderbird does not set the account correctly. Instead, it uses the personal account (marysue@...) for some reason, then sets the "custom e-mail address" option in the composition window and fills the From: header with the address from the draft (info@...). But it does not recognise that this is the same address as the existing default account, and thus, does not use that account.

As long as you work on the same PC, this is not an issue. If Joebob opens the draft on his PC, TB will recognise the account and set it corretly. It will not use the custom sender feature. Same thing on Marysue's PC. The problem only happens when the draft goes from one PC to the other.

This should not happen because there is an existing account for exactly that From: address in the draft, so TB could just use it. Even if it didn't for some reason, it should use the default account with the custom address feature (effectively getting the same result). But for some reason, it chooses to use the non-default marysue@... account to send the mail and then store the copy in the wrong "Sent" folder.

Comment 1

[Alfred Peters [:infofrommozilla]]

(In reply to Malte Wetz from comment #0)

> When opening a draft that was saved on a different PC, Thunderbird does not
> set the account correctly. Instead, it uses the personal account
> (marysue@...) for some reason,

For sure. The explanation is:
When 'Joebob' saves the draft message, the account and e-mail address
(possibly an alias) is stored as temporary headers within the message (the
numbers differ):

| X-Account-Key: account4 
| X-Identity-Key: id5

If 'Marysue' opens the email, TB will use account4 and the id5 of her TB.
The numbering in her TB certainly differs from that in 'Joebobs' TB.

The actual e-mail address is not considered at all.
This would not be practical, because you can set the same address in multiple
accounts. For example, to have different configurations for an address.

Comment 2

[Malte Wetz]

Well, it may be an explanation, but this is IMHO not how the program should behave. Because that's not the behaviour an unassuming user would expect.

First: *If* someone actually used the same address in different accounts, ok, fine. Ask. Or at least pick any one of those that actually do match. There's still a better chance to guess the right one than randomly picking from *all* available accounts. But in most cases, people will use a given address on only one account. So it's not that crazy a thought to use that as indicator when selecting the actual sender. You'd get it right ~90% of the time.

Second: Even if you could make the case that TB cannot possibly be expected to check the From: address against existing accounts for whatever reason, then at least use the *default* account as the sender. That is what people expect from a default setting. That it's going to be used in those cases where a more specific determination cannot be made.

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

This is a well-known issue when saved drafts are worked on from a machine with a different setup. We're working on a fix in bug 394216. Sadly, the contributor disappeared, so the TB team will pick up this bug and fix it in due course (meaning once the month we have set to wait for the contributor has lapsed).