1710319 - IMAP Folder subscribe dialog - "Subscribe"/"Unsubscribe" buttons redundant and confusing

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Ben Campbell]

Attachment: subscribe_dialog.png

I've just been playing with IMAP folder subscriptions (right click on an IMAP account to being up the context menu, click the "Subscribe..." item).

There's a list of folders with clickable checkboxes, showing which folders are subscribed.

There are also "Subscribe" and "Unsubscribe" buttons. I found these confusing. On first glance, I expected them to actually perform the (un)subscribe operation. But then I saw the "Cancel"/"OK" pair below which implies otherwise...
So the (Un)Subscribe buttons just check (or uncheck) selected folders in the folder treeview. It seems much more intuitive to just have the user click the checkboxes directly.

I'm not quite sure why the extra buttons are there... I could imagine that they're useful if you have a huge number of IMAP folders and you want to multi-select them? Is that a common use case?
(although, in that situation, maybe it'd be more intuitive that toggling a checkbox of a selected folder sets the checkbox state for all selected folders?)

Not a huge deal, but it just felt like a design rough edge...

Comment 1

[Adalbert Chamisso]

(In reply to Ben Campbell from comment #0)

So the (Un)Subscribe buttons just check (or uncheck) selected folders in the folder treeview. It seems much more intuitive to just have the user click the checkboxes directly.

What is worse, the the tree widget doesn't update when the button is clicked, you need to hover the mouse other the left hand side after clicking the button for it to update.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

That part went to bug 1813346

Comment 3

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan) [PTO, back 2 Nov]]

Attachment: Bug 1710319 - Remove subscribe/unsubscribe buttons from subscribe dialog. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Comment 4

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/2bbe5811f64e
Remove subscribe/unsubscribe buttons from subscribe dialog. r=aleca

Comment 5

[Vlad Lucaci, Thunderbird QA (:vlucaci)]

Confirming this issue as verified fixed with 133.0b3(20241107210012) using Windows 11, macOS 14, and Ubuntu 22.