278775 - Drafts not autosaved periodically as in Outlook, Vim, Word, modern editors...

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 16360

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[L A Walsh]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: version 0.9 (20041103) et al.

I have just lost another email to the primitive text editor I have to use
under Mozilla -- is there a way to change my text editor to "Gvim" -- it
would be a good workaround for this type of bug.

But Mozilla/Thunderbird *should* save composed emails in the draft file 
periodically (every 5-10) minutes by _default_ like most modern text editors.

I've had email's I've composed over 2-4 hours (taking breaks, looking for 
details to put in email), and twice have had Thunderbird crashes that wiped
out my work.  Outlook, Gvim, Word and other compose utilities auto-save one's
work every 5-10 minutes incase of catastrophic failure.

I'm told, that even if one does a clean shut-down of Windows, Thunderbird isn't
smart enough to save work-in-progress.  Even though I tell it *not* to ask me
when saving to drafts and copies folders, it still tries to put up a dialogue 
that defaults to "no" if not answered during shutdown.

Drafts should be saved automatically during any shutdown or program failure, 
if possible.  They should also be saved periodically every 5-10 minutes 
(ideally settable by the user).  I feel like I'm back in the '80's with 
unreliable software/OS's that I had to manually remember to save copies of
due to no-autosave of work and software failures.

I'm surprised this wasn't a feature added in during early design to avoid
losing work during an unstable development release.  

It sure would be nice if I could have it call my own editor for text or HTML
editing -- mainly GVIM for text editing -- I so often can't tell if I'm
above or below 80 columns in the T-bird GUI.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Compose email
2. Generate Tbird fault, or externally kill it using the process kill feature
3. (or) do a reboot 

Actual Results:  
Composed work is lost.

Expected Results:  
Periodically, work should be auto-saved to prevent significant loses.


Note -- this is a *critical* severity bug as it does cause loss of user
data.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Not a critical bug, sorry -- it's an enhancement.  Also, do you really think 
you're the first person to run up against this issue?  Please search the 
database before entering a bug.

As it happens, a patch is underway.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 16360 ***

Comment 2

[L A Walsh]

Did search...the one's I saw had to do with saving it on sending or 
saving on an unexpected exit.  This isn't the greatest thing to do as
the 'corruption' that causes the unexpected exit might have corrupted
the save mechanism.  

Only periodic saves to the "Drafts" folder seem logical.  Auto-saved drafts
would be deleted on successful send.