1897600 - Unnecessary modal dialog boxes

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

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Attachment: TB_Stupid_Dialogs.gif

Steps to reproduce:

Just use TB with a lot of folders and sooner or later a background operation will try to do a maintenance task, find the task locked for some reason or another, and throw a modal dialog box to tell you that the task you didn't know was running can't do the task you didn't ask it to do right now and demand approval for it to not do that task now and get to it later. This is not a request, OK?

Actual results:

Thunderbird regularly throws modal dialog boxes with a single option to inform users of something they're not remotely engaged in and that do not matter at all, except to get rid of the stupid modal dialog box and get back to work. Or it throws errors with a false choice, retry or cancel. Obviously retry later when the network is working again and why bother me, the user, with your dumb problems?

Expected results:

Maybe, if logs are enabled, log the error plus details just in case the user wants to investigate why some background maintenance task wasn't happening, if they notice.

As a rule, modal dialog boxes are satan's spawn. They are only necessary when something really bad has happened that will result in loss of data or prevent the user from doing their work. Examples might include having the hard disk fail or the network go out during send or (though this is not a modal dialog and should be) the messages not background sending from the outbox after 3 attempts or 30 minutes or something. Or when the user has to make a choice between two bad options and that choice actually makes a difference.

That a folder could not be background compacted because another operation is in progress is NOT something I, or any other user, needs to know at all let alone interrupt our work and demand that we acknowledge this passive aggressive complaint by one worker thread that another worker thread is jamming their work flow.

If your network happens to drop, Bender help you, every message in the outbox has to seek affirmation that you know it tried to send it and failed, please forgive the program. Nothing you can do about it, just want to make you, the user, as miserable as the program feels right now not being connected. It will try later. Why not just have a "connected to IMAP" indicator and quietly cue transient failures for later retry?

The "retry or cancel" dialogs are just as stupid, just keep retrying in the background, the network will return. Sure TB gets very confused by network changes and you usually have to restart to get it to work again. Maybe that would be useful: "ONE message that your network changed causing TB to lose connectivity, restart to reconnect when you can, all send operations have failed. Fetch operations, for some reason, manage to find the new server. OK?"

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Maybe bug 1867762
For the ones requiring input/choice, they do need to pop up as dialogs.