1720824 - Option to remove "Recent" and "Favourites" from the "Copy/move to" menus.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[antisol+thunderbird]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0 Waterfox/56.3

Steps to reproduce:

1. In inbox, select a message and right-click to bring up the context menu. Choose either "Move to" or "Copy to"

2. Choose "Recent" option (note that you'll struggle to not choose recent because it's the first item in the list, so regardless of whether you intend to use it or not, it's almost always populated)

3. Wait for a ridiculously huge (~10s for me) amount of time as the recent menu populates

4. Continue using your email client as you actually want to now that the ridiculously long wait is over, choosing a folder that's not in the "recent" or "favourite" structure, as I have literally never used either of these features and have zero desire to ever do so.

Actual results:

Ridiculously long wait time as the 'recent' menu populates in step 3. Wait time is less ludicrous for the "favourites" menu, but also far far too long. Also the fact that these items are first in the menu means that it's difficult to avoid selecting them, thus making the huge wait time almost unavoidable.

Expected results:

The useless "Recent" and "Favourites" menu items should not have appeared in the context menu when I chose "Move To" or "Copy To".

Instead they should have been disabled/reomved because I had previously gone into preferences and selected the new "Don't show these useless options which you have never used and which do nothing but waste your time because they're so pitifully slow" in the preferences menu.

(I'm open to alternative labels for the option ;) )

Comment 1

[WaltS48 [:walts48]]

Where do I find this "Don't show these useless options which you have never used and which do nothing but waste your time because they're so pitifully slow" option in Preferences, and what is the actual wording?

I don't see it in my 92.0a1 en-US on Fedora 34 Workstation, Gnome 40 Desktop.

Comment 2

[antisol+thunderbird]

Sorry, apparently my sarcasm has not translated well.

There is no such option. I'm saying there should be. That's why this is an enhancement request and I described it as a new option, and why I said I'm open to alternate labels.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

The Recent menu is usually not slow at all. If you can figure out why, we could fix that. I don't think we want an option not to show it.

Comment 4

[antisol+thunderbird]

My suggestion as to why it's running slow would be because it's dealing with a large mailbox and hundreds of thousands of messages in hundreds or maybe even thousands of folders. We're talking 30+ years worth of email here. Or pehaps it's because I turned indexing off because I don't want thunderbird eating my disk and CPU constantly as it tries to index hundreds of thousands of messages. Who knows? Who cares?

I'm not going to spend any time debugging why it's slow, because I don't care why it's slow, because I have no desire to ever use the feature.

If you want to figure out why it's slow then go right ahead, but I expect the effort will be far greater than simply offering an option to not have the menu item for people who will never ever use it.

And even if you do figure out why it's slow, that still won't give the same UX improvement that my suggestion will give.

Why would you not want an option to not show it? That's a really simple thing to do.

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

What I'm saying is it would be fixing the wrong problem. If the menu is slow we should fix that, not add an obscure option nobody would find.