295599 - Inline Newsgroup Archiving / Don't delete downloaded news messages

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, enhancement)

Description

[Gudmund Areskoug]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 1.0 (20041206)

The newsgroup part of Thunderbird should allow "inline archiving", i. e. similar
handling of messages downloaded for offline purposes as with mail messages,
regardless of server side expiry dates etc.

Currently, the newsgroup and the mail part of Thunderbird look and behave so
much like each other, that the user is led to beleive they function in exactly
the same way, regardless of the underlying communication protocols.

However, a mail message that was downloaded, stays in the local mailbox file
until deleted, but a newsgroup message that was downloaded for offline use still
gets treated depending on things that happen on the corresponding newsgroup server.

With the current unified user interface, and the namings, e. g. "Download" and
"...for offline use", the user is led to beleive the downloaded message is
safely saved and archived to disk locally. So, if the server has e. g. a message
expiry date, the user is in for a surprise when synchronizing, and unexpectedly
getting presumably saved messages erased. 

Same goes for other related actions and functions.

The only possibility to safely archive NG messages now, is to manually copy them
to some other folder. Apart from being unnecessarily clumsy and cumbersome, this
procedure is also lossy. E. g. no labels are kept intact.

There should be a setting "Inline archiving", that safeguards all messages that
were downloaded for offline use from any actions other than the local user
deleting them through conscious actions of his/her own.

This way, smooth, intuitive and comfortable on-the-fly inline archiving can be
achieved, as can reportedly be seen in various other Newsgroup agents.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Download newsgroup messages for offline use
2a. Perform any NG-server-related action affecting messages, e. g. synchronizing
folder or simply wait and watch any "Unread" offline message expire on server
2b. Select and copy a batch of flagged and labelled NG messages to any local folder


Actual Results:  
After 2a.: After synchronizing, offline messages that have expired on server are
also deleted locally, "Unread" offline messages automatically get marked "Read"
upon polling NG server after expiry date.

After 2b.: Not all message info is copied along, like e. g. labels. Copying the
message and index files themselves, outside TB, produces a similar result,
perhaps to do with index files/info not being copied along.

Expected Results:  
2a.: The software should, at least optionally, leave offline messages alone
until expressedly told to delete them - not as an indirect result of other actions.

2b.: If the above cannot or will not be done, TB should allow non-lossy copying
of messages including *all* associated visible info to some other local folder
for safekeeping/archiving, and the UI should be changed to more visibly reflect
the difference in behaviour, so as not to mislead the user, resulting in data loss.

Because of the IMHO misleading similarity in TB between Newsgroups and Mail, I'm
not sure whether to set severity to "Bug" or "RFE". 

I am fairly well aware of the differences between e. g. POP for mail and NNTP
for newsgroups, and was still mislead by the user interface, especially coupled
with knowledge of other newsreaders offline behaviour.

So I'll set it to "Normal".

Comment 1

[Gudmund Areskoug]

Testing in TB 2.0.0.6, it seems like case 2b works. Will test if case 2a still needs fixing when I find the time to.