306228 - Provide help for 'Do you wish to compact..."

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 286888

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Matjaz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

When a message box with "Do you wish to compact..." pops up, there should be an
explanation of what this is and suggestion that users do so.
Not-so-computer-savvy users and users coming from other mail clients are not
used to "compacting" and have no idea of what this is.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

I think the better solution to this is bug 286888, which totally does away with
this UI. If you agree go ahead and mark this bug as a duplicate of it.

Comment 2

[Matjaz]

Yes, bug 286888 would solve this problem. But I don't think this will be fixed
very soon (if at all) - there are a lot of different opinions. That's why I
propose to explain to novice users what this is and what they are advised to do.
Imagine some user Outlook user seeing this pop-up - he has absolutely no idea of
what this is, get confudes and go back to Outlook (Express).

Plus adding a few lines of text to that message box takes little more time than
having this discussion... 

Comment 3

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Bryan, is this best implemented in-app or in online/offline support docs?

Comment 4

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

I agree to comment #1: this will get fixed when bug #286888 lands.

Comment 5

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

Agree that the best solution would be to remove the compact option and make it automatic.

(In reply to comment #3)
> Bryan, is this best implemented in-app or in online/offline support docs?

Since compact can be done offline as well as online I would think we'd need at least a simple version of help offline.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

a few questions about this in gfsn: http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/tags/compactwhy

and probably some of the people also with http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/tags/compactask

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

duping, since this isn't going to get fixed. 

offline doc does exist at https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/compact-inbox-or-other-folder?s=compact&as=s  and I've posted an item to improve the doc per https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/forums/knowledge-base-articles/676