262012 - not easy to navigate the search message results pane

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 95140

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Jonathan Payne]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

Let's say you perform a search and find 10 messages scattered throughout your
inbox or even across multiple folders.  Typically what I would like to do is
open a message window for the first message, and then step through all the
messages in the search results while re-using that message window. 
Unfortunately, when I press the Next or Prev button in the message window I
opened up, it goes to the next or previous message in the folder that the
message originated in.

That's no good.

So, I hate to say this, but the app that does this just right is Outlook and
Outlook Express.  I think the way it works is, There's a message list and
there's a message pane, and a message list can be from a folder or it can be
from search results.  But once you pop up a message window, it is initialized
with a message list and a location in that list, and the next/prev buttons refer
to that list.


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

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

we hope to be able to let you read messages from the search results window,
which would help.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

What David is referring to is Bug 258371, and might be simpler to implement than making a seperate window able to navigate the search results.  Preview in seach panel (Bug 258371) should also make it simpler to impliment something like Bug 55557 - multiple advanced search messages windows.

(BTW, I agree)

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Duping to core bug.

(In reply to comment #0)
> [in] Outlook Express[...] once you pop up a message window, it is initialized
> with a message list and a location in that list, and the next/prev buttons
> refer to that list.

Actually, we do initialize the standalone message window with a list when opened from a regular folder.  (I recently saw a complaint about that from someone decrying the "hidden state" as bad UI.)  And, this works if the folder is a virtual (saved search) folder.  But the Search Messages window itself is highly bereft of features.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 95140 ***