321409 - When starting Thunderbird, it should position on the inbox

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 510272

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Geert Poels]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Apparently this kind of behaviour can be enabled by setting the 'Check for new messages at startup'.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_FAQs_:_Open_in_Inbox

Of course, if I don't immediately want to check for mail, the only way appears to be the use of an extension which I find weird for such a trivial functionality.

Can't this be added as an option to the Tools\Options\Thunderbird start ?
It seems so basic.

BTW : enabling/disabling this feature shows no difference.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Duplicate of bug 273082, related to Suite bug 207567?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

for Bryan

Comment 3

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

Not trying for a complicated answer here but...  it seems like a couple things are going wrong in this instance.

By default Thunderbird should be remembering and opening to the last folder / view a person had opened when Thunderbird was closed.

Of course by default Thunderbird should be checking for new mail ( at least in the Inbox ) such that even if you open to another folder mail is fetched for your Inbox.

If nothing was last selected last then the default should be to grab the Inbox.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

can you test to see what gets selected with a new profile and new account?

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Actual behaviour should be examined, I think the MozillaZine information is outdated.

I think the problem of comment 0 could be well solved with a simple option in Tools > Options where user can specify a default folder which is always shown at Thunderbird startup, regardless of which folder or tab was last active when exiting Thunderbird.

Which would make a lot of sense because the fact that I've last looked into that specific mail yesterday evening doesn't mean I want to start with same message today, while it's still ok to remember and reopen the last used tabs. I think we're different from browsers here because Mail can really have a central starting point in some inbox.

Similar requests found, needs cleanup and consolidation/morphing into something actionable.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I think just allowing the user to choose any folder as a startup folder will be the most simple, universal and sustainable solution covering this, requiring just a single pref. As a proof of concept, I have implemented this for the address book (as a simple checkbox in primary folder context UI), and everyone is happy. If unchecked, it goes back to remember last. If there's no last, choose a reasonable default like inbox of default account.