1708283 - Default mail account will not retain list position with 89.0b1 update

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[captseaton]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:89.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/89.0

Steps to reproduce:

I updated to the latest beta build (89.0b1).

Actual results:

The list of mail accounts has always kept the default account at the top of the list of multiple accounts. No matter what I do, my default mail account is moved to the bottom of the list. I have tried deleting all accounts and rebuilding them one by one. This seemed to work at first, but then on the second restart, my mailbox moved again.

Expected results:

All previous versions of Thunderbird have kept the 1st mail account added, in order, at the top of the list of accounts. This version has decided to change the order with no provision for changing it back. If someone has 5 or more accounts, this can become infuriating as re-ordering the accounts does not "stick".

Comment 1

[José M. Muñoz]

Do you realize that you can reorder accounts in the account manager by dragging them around in TB 89 beta? Maybe some bug was introduced when implementing that (bug 244347).

Comment 2

[captseaton]

(In reply to José M. Muñoz from comment #1)

Do you realize that you can reorder accounts in the account manager by dragging them around in TB 89 beta? Maybe some bug was introduced when implementing that (bug 244347).

Absolutely, you can drag them around, I have tried this. The mailboxes are reordered upon restarting Thunderbird. I have also tried making a different mailbox the default account and it still gets moved to the bottom of the list.

My only solution, so far, is to delete the other mailboxes so that my default mailbox is always at the top of the list.

Comment 3

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

Reordering should take place immediately. Also, the first start of the new version should have retained your old order. You say it got inverted?
The order is now strictly based on the order in the messenger.accounts pref. New accounts are added above the local folders, if those are at the bottom of the list (not counting outgoing servers), else they are added to the end of the list, I think. However I did not write that initial logic, so I'm not very familiar with it. I think setting an account as default should move it to the start of the list, too.

I wonder if this could be a locale issue where somehow start and end aren't the same (top to bottom vs. bottom to top?)

Comment 4

[captseaton]

The change in order happened from 89.0b1 to 89.0b2. No issues before the change. My layout is set to wide view, so I would have my primary email at the top, second email account in the middle, and third email account minimized at the bottom of the list. Primary email account has always been set to "default" as long as that option has been available.

I thought maybe, since I have been using Thunderbird for so long, my old account had some config issues. I cleared my profile folder and re-created the email accounts (using the wizard) one by one. Created my primary first, then second, then third. Everything seemed to be fine. I restarted Thunderbird and it seemed to work. The second restart, the accounts flipped again. For the record my primary is a Gmail account, the other two are rarely used. They include an aol.com address and another gmail.com address.

For some reason the aol.com account would go to the top, the secondary gmail account middle, and my primary account always would shift to the bottom of the list. With my wide view setting, the only comfortable way to scan email was to minimize the other two. I have temporarily dealt with the issue by completely removing the other accounts.

I am using this for personal email, but I do provide some support for family and others who are using TB with 5 accounts or more and dread the day I have to try to explain why their mail accounts are moving around.

Comment 5

[Martin Giger [:freaktechnik]]

Hm, I'm not sure anything related to the bug José mentioned changed between those two betas, since it landed on the 89 branch before it went to beta. To confirm if something with the account ordering infrastructure is going wrong, I'd ask you to add your three accounts, make note of the order in messenger.accounts and possibly also ensure the account IDs match with your accounts (usually easy to identify by searching for accountN). Then, after they have flipped, verify the order in the pref. If the initial order doesn't match or the order changes after the restart there's definitely something wrong that is somehow related to the bug.

Comment 6

[captseaton]

I wasn't looking forward to losing my ancient profile folder, but I went ahead and started with a blank canvas. I think what convinced me that something was amiss, was my account number was 8 even though it was the only account currently displayed on the old profile. I added the email accounts one by one. I migrated my address book over. I have also moved my mail by the old school drag and drop method in the appropriate profile folders. So far so good. The default mailbox is now at the top.

Thanks for all the help, I assume (now) this was not a bug, but a slight change in code that did not play well with my old profile.

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Are you using the All Folders view, or something else (like Unified)

Comment 9

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

WFM per comment 6.