1675212 - By accidentally pressing the `Delete` key for a little too long, more messages than expected will be deleted.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect, P1)

Description

[albertfora]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/86.0.4240.183 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Press the delete button a little too long

Actual results:

unwanted emails are deleted.

Expected results:

Only one email should be deleted

Comment 1

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Which Delete button?

The one in the message header, one you placed in the Mail Toolbar from the Customize widget, or the Delete key on the keyboard.

I have to release the mouse button to delete a message using the first two methods.

Comment 2

[albertfora]

The Delete key on the keyboard. This is the button I always use for this. Pressing it a little bit too long and many mails will be deleted, what is unwanted.

Comment 3

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Thanks for the clarification.

Pressing the Delete key on the keyboard for too long does delete multiple emails in succession as it does for any file in an application and the operating systems File manager.

I don't think there is anything here for Thunderbird to fix.

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to WaltS48 [:walts48] from comment #3)

Hi Walt, thanks for looking into this bug and all your help with triage!

Pressing the Delete key on the keyboard for too long does delete multiple emails in succession as it does for any file in an application and the operating systems File manager.

I've rarely seen "files in an application" other than file managers. I don't recall ever deleting items which are not part of text with long keypress.
Windows 10 File Explorer does not allow deleting multiple files sequentially by selecting the first file and holding down Delete key. Instead, the next file will be focused, but not selected - which in turn prevents the deletion.
That looks like a safe and reasonable behaviour to me - uncontrolled deletions by holding down a deletion key may work for text and small items like recipient pills (which are text-ish, and typically easy to restore), but not for bigger and more important items like entire files or messages (harder or even impossible to restore). Instead, to delete multiple items safely, just select them first and then press Delete.

I don't think there is anything here for Thunderbird to fix.

Looking at some similar bugs on record, I do think we should fix this in terms of ux-error-prevention - most actions which are repeated in an uncontrolled manner do not really make sense, and we can even run into issues as we're not expecting that (see A shortcut bug below).

Bug 1705824 - Holding down the A key for repeated archiving results in lots of extra blank messages in Archive, and corruption of Undo (POP3 only)
Bug 622305 - Holding one second Ctrl+O (Open Message) or Ctrl+N (New message) creates 30+ duplicate tabs or composition windows (too long, multiple, a lot of, many...)

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

This may or may not be a good-first-bug (delete command flavors are pretty nested, but maybe we can just catch repeated command event somewhere).

Comment 6

[chrizilla]

Can repro in TB 115 and TB 128.0a1 (2024-05-17) (64-bit) @ Win10-64bit
and agree with Thomas D. This is dangerous.

Comment 7

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Trying to get this into next ESR.
Vineet, can you take care of this?
We can use the event.repeat condition to check if the user is pressing Delete and holding it down.

Comment 8

[Vineet Deo]

Attachment: Bug 1675212 - Prevent deleting multiple messages when holding delete. r=#thunderbird-reviewers

Comment 9

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/e915d642bded
Prevent deleting multiple messages when holding delete. r=mkmelin

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/539f11da1660
Followup: fix linting issues. rs=lint

Comment 11

[Ramona Gavrilescu]

Hello,
Managed to reproduce this issue with the affected build from 2020-06-11 78.0b1(20200611220825) using Windows 10.
Confirming this issue as verified fixed on 128.0b1(20240610221456) using Windows 10.