296425 - RFE: Task progress window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 257942

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Joe McCabe]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050602 Firefox/1.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050602 Firefox/1.0+

With modern (trunk builds of Thunderbird it has become possible for several
tasks (Junk Mail classification, Retention Policy, Filters, etc) to be running
simultaneously that will consume all available bandwidth (especially on slower
dial-up connections), can't be halted, and provide no feedback to the user about
what is happening.

Thunderbird shoul doffer a tasks window that indicates what tasks are running,
their progress, and offers the ability to pause, stop, and resume those tasks
without negatively impacting the other tasks.

While this is marginally related to 61139, it's not a duplicate.

Proposed window would be very similar to the Firefox downloads window:

-----------------------------------------------------
| Task Status                                       |
-----------------------------------------------------
| Account: Personal                                 |
| Task: Junk Mail Classification     PAUSE   STOP   |
| Progress: 45% (45 of 100 messages)                |
|---------------------------------------------------|
| Account: Personal                                 |
| Task: Retention Evaluation         PAUSE   STOP   |
| Progress: 10% (1 of 10 folders)                   |
|---------------------------------------------------|
| Account: Work                                     |
| Task: Receiving Message Headers    RESUME  STOP   |
| Progress: 75% (150 of 200 headers), paused        |
|---------------------------------------------------|
| Etcetera...                                       |
|                                                   |

"Progress" would also contain a thermometer where possible to indicate visually
the state.

This would allow all users to see what's happening and so-called "power users"
to apply some level of control over which tasks take priority by pausing/killing
tasks that are consuming bandwidth or CPU while allowing others to proceed.

Real World Example of Relevancy:
Due to the number of tasks that insist on downloading the messages (seaming over
and over) on my very narrow bandwidth connection I am frequently unable to work
with any of my email for hours at a time. I am forced to open my profile and
disable every feature that in any way looks at message contents and then restart
Thunderbird in order to regain control of the downloads, and then manually
delete the huge backlog of spam that so badly clogged things up. Rather than go
through this pain of disable/restart/delete/enable/restart I often find myself
instead quitting Thunderbird, switching to Evolution, manually deleting all the
****, and re-launching Thunderbird. This allows me to bypass all the features
that want to examine contents without having to disable them and re-enable them
later.

It should alo be pointed out that most other mail clients offer this kind of
view of the tasks being performed, so a lack of this view puts Thunderbird at a
disadvantage to them.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Mail/News bug 68727

Comment 2

[Thomas K. (:tom)]

moving to all systems/all os

at minimum a send/recv window similar to outlook express would aid in avoiding confusion, which is currently aided immensely in bothering my mom with bug 277634

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 258444 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 219685, another SeaMonkey bug that's closer to this one.

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Xref bug 61139...

Comment 8

[zug_treno]

This bug might be a duplicate of bug 238972, although that bug only requests a status window during message downloads.

Comment 10

[David :Bienvenu]

marking wanted- but cc'ing Bryan for his potential feedback.

Comment 11

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

looks like some of these ideas should be merged into bug 257942