242561 - Message navigation (Next/Previous Message, Unread, Unread Thread) and Delete do not update selected message in main mail window

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Seth McFarland]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8

Navigating to the "Next" or "Previous" unread message through the menu or
keyboard (F and B) when reading a message in a standalone message window does
not change the highlighted message in the main mail window.  It seems to work
fine when using the preview pane.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a mail message in a standalone window
2. Hit 'F', 'B' or click "Go -> Previous Unread" or "Go -> Next Unread"
3.

Actual Results:  
The message window loads the correct email but the main mail window does not
reflect the changed selection.

Expected Results:  
The main mail window should highlight the appropriate message after going to
"next" or "previous" unread message.

Comment 1

[Seth McFarland]

I've determined that this bug does not just occur when using next "unread" and
previous "unread" -- it happens when a user deletes a message from a stand alone
message window and when using any of the menu items under "Go" (next/previous
message, unread, unread thread).

Comment 2

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

This is WONTFIX. Since you can have 1..n standalone message windows, there's no
way of doing this such that the main mail window's selection indicator provides
useful information by listening to the selection from standalone message windows.

Comment 3

[bax3]

> This is WONTFIX. Since you can have 1..n standalone message windows, there's
> no way of doing this such that the main mail window's selection indicator
> provides useful information by listening to the selection from standalone
> message windows.

Outlook does it.  So does Outlook Express.  The solution, which matches intuitive expectation, is to update the main window selection to reflect whichever message is most recently updated.

Consider: 
(a) double-click on message 1 in main window to open message window -> message 1 is selected.
(b) double-click on message 3 in main window to open message window -> message 3 is selected.
(c) click forward in message 1 window -> message window displays message 2 and message 2 is selected

When the user returns to the main window, the selection is where he expects it to be: at the most recently opened message.