321651 - "Mark as read"+checked should be "mark as unread" (change menu text instead of checkmark)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(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

Right-click on any message in any folder.
If the message has not yet been read (see the closed envelope icon), right-click it and mark it as read or just read it.
Right-click this item again.
Instead of having a checked 'mark as read' menu-item, the menu should read mark as unread.
It would be much clearer what this action does.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Back at bug 124531, it was decided that there would not be two menu items 
"mark as read" and "mark as unread" because the menu item is a toggle.  Unfortunately, the toggle model breaks down with multiple messages selected -- bug 102518.

See bug 223073 which both describes an actual bug with the implementation and discusses an approach with varying items in the context menu -- which has its own problems.

Comment 2

[Geert Poels]

I fully agree that two menu-items would be silly.
But wouldn't a change of the text of the menu-item be much clearer already ?
Thus describing what this menu-action does.

I'm not in favour of a checkbox but if some would find that clearer, OK with me.

Comment 4

[nrlz]

I also agree that the current text is non-conventional. Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Gmail all provide both options instead of "[Y/N] Mark as Read". Perhaps there should be menu items for all 3 scenarios.

- 1 selection: mark as read
- 1 selection: mark as unread
- multiple selections: [Y/N] mark all as read/unread.

Comment 5

[Gareth Lloyd]

The notion of toggle is inappropriate as illustrated in Mike's comment. The usability for multiple select could be adopted (by having two separate menu elements) and then adapted to work for a single selection by disabling the inappropriate menu element.

Comment 6

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Fixed by bug 575732.