1642307 - warn/ask if deleting large number of messages

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Dave]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:76.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/76.0

Steps to reproduce:

When cleaning out your inbox you shift delete to remove emails, the delete key is right next to the end key, if you fat finger there is the potential that end will be hit before the delete key.

Actual results:

Everything in your inbox from the current email to the end is deleted, not what you intended.

Expected results:

Thunderbird should detect that you've selected to the end of the inbox and warn/ask you if you are intending to delete this large number of emails. Alternatively prompt whenever some threshold number of emails is about to be deleted under any circumstances, possibly have a setting to control this threshold.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Sort of like Bug 958088 - TB does not ask on Shift+Delete when using Unified folders

I should be finding more matches, but so far I am unsuccessful https://mzl.la/3eBaX5O

Comment 3

[chrizilla]

enhancement idea 💡

Warn before deleting multiple messages at once:

WARNING: You are deleting 296 messages. Are you sure?
[delete ALL] [cancel]

When SHIFT+DEL is used:

WARNING: You are permanently deleting 296 messages, without saving a copy to Trash. Are you sure ?
[delete ALL] [cancel]

implementation

add user-prefs:

• mail.warn_on_delete_many --> default=true
• mail.warn_on_delete_many.threshold --> self-explanatory (if set to 10, deletion of 10 or more messages will trigger a warning).

user story

Michael Toomim says in bug 209333:

« I just tried to delete a message from the top of my mailbox with shift-delete, but my finger accidentally hit the "end" key at the same time as the "delete" key (while holding down shift). This caused my entire directory (containing some 1800 messages) to be deleted. That really sucked. »

more thoughts and user stories here