238557 - [RFE] Mails marked Send Later should be easier to send

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[s.marshall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5+ (20040318)

If you are not currently connected to the Internet, you cannot send mail
immediately. Instead you must use Send Later. When you do this, the mail
disappears into a black hole and is never send, unless you think to go to the
File menu and choose 'Send Unsent Messages'.

Thunderbird should have a better interface for this situation which ensures that
the mail are sent. Here are two suggestions:

a) Change the 'Get Mail' button to 'Send and Receive Mail' like Outlook Express.
This automatically sends any 'stored' mail when you connect to check mail -
obviously, at that time you will have an Internet connection, so it's a very
good moment. This also reduces the effort in sending mail. This change could be
combined with other changes to make 'Get Mail' not suck, detailed in bug 125885.
Frankly, Outlook Express's interface is hugely better in this regard, so you
might as well steal it.

b) When there are messages to send, make a 'Send Mail' button automatically
appear in the toolbar to the left of 'Get Mail' (i.e. so that 'Get Mail'
shuffles along). This would be hard to miss and would remind users to send their
mail, while keeping basically the current interface.

I searched for this bug and didn't find it; however there are some related bugs:

Bug 149963 describes the consequence of the current behaviour (that it is
confusing because you can accidentally 'lose' mails). However, that bug
describes only the confusingness of the behaviour if you *accidentally* choose
Send Later. The behaviour is still confusing even if you choose Send Later on
purpose.

(Another important problem in this area is bug 217337 which means that, when not
connected to the Internet, 'Send Later' does not automatically appear in the
mail compose window.)


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jason Haar]

This is a "me too".

I'm no newcomer to email and I just sent two emails offline, and wondered where
they disappeared to. I went onlone, did a "Get Mail" and wondered why those two
emails didn't show up in my INBOX (I Cc'ed myself). Finally I hunted around
waaaaay down to the bottom "Local Folders" (I have several IMAP accounts, "News
& Blogs", newsgroups) and saw the "Unsent Messages" folder.

I think whenever you go online, Thunderbird should prompt "you have unsent
messages - shall I send now?". 100% of the time people will say "YES". In fact,
I think you could get rid of the prompt - just send it. Change "Send Later" to
"Send when next online" and be done with it :-)

Jason

Comment 2

[Mike Coppins]

I was using the Outbox extension to provide this functionality, but now
Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 1 disables all old extension (and Outbox is positively
ancient).

I suggest integrating the functionality of the Outbox extension
(outbox.mozdev.org) into Thunderbird 1.5.

Comment 3

[Rolf Leggewie]

spent about two hours today to figure out why the messages I sent yesterday while being on the train did not show up in my Sent folder.  

This is absolutely bad.  I created the mails from IMAP account $A, why should I need to look under the "account" "Local folders" to be able to send it?  Switching to account $A does not enable the menu entry "Send unsent messages" and going online with the appropriate box ticked does not send the messages either.  I only figured this whole business out by wading through a bunch of bug reports (nobody on IRC was able to help!) until I hit this one.

This is not only unintuitive but IMHO positively broken.  I suggest to change TB behaviour as outlined in comment #1.

Comment 5

[Peter Karp]

There is a serious set of related problems described in this bug and
in bug 149963 that I don't think should have remained unfixed for six years!!!

In particular 149963 has bitten me several times: when I use
ctrl-Return to send a message, I sometimes also hit the shift key
by mistake because it is near the ctrl key on my keyboard.  This causes
the message composition window to disappear with no trace of what
has happened.  And I didn't even know that I had hit the shift key by
mistake, so I didn't know what to look for.  Today this finally occurred
to me, and I traced through that the message went to the Unsent Messages
folder.

In summary:

1. It is bad design to use ctrl-shift-Return as a keyboard accelerator
for anything because it can be easily confused with ctrl-Return and
hit by mistake.  Choose a different accelerator for Send Later.

2. Fix the other problems in this bug, namely making it more apparent
that messages in the Send Later mailbox need to be sent.

Comment 6

[David :Bienvenu]

I suspect cntrl shift return should respect the same warning pref that cntrl return does, i.e., prompt the user.

When you restart the app, we do tell you you have unsent messages, or is that not working for you?

Comment 7

[Peter Karp]

Yes, when I restart Thunderbird it does tell me I have unsent messages
and offer to send them, and it does send them correctly when I ask it
to.  So this is all good.  But note I can sometimes go weeks at a
time without restarting the app on my desktop or laptop.