325039 - Mailnews needs visual feedback for long startup operations

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Bishop Clark (LC957)]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051219 SeaMonkey/1.0b
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051219 SeaMonkey/1.0b

I know that when I've not had seamonkey running for an hour or two, I'll get a couple dozen pieces of mail.  Some of those will be junk.

When mailnews starts up, the total/new mail counts seem to change, indicating it's doing something, and then it largely becomes unresponsive for a period.  Sometimes I'll sit here, when I'm so frustrated that I'm all but seething, wishing I could just ask it "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?"  

I figure it's doing something but I have no idea what it is:  junk mail is partially marked but not moved, I can (intermittently) view various pieces of mail, but that's almost about it.  I resort to twiddling with the UI to see if I can convince it to Just.Do.Anything, almost without caring what it is.  I bet I'm making the problem worse, but I have no way of knowing.

The short summary of my report is:  the UI perhaps needs to be able to show it's doing something, so that the user doesn't sit for what feels like an eternity in front of a faceless and unmoving display.  An example may be, in the status bar:
 - compacting junk folder
 - moving message 1 of 12 to junk
 - communicating with imap server my.mail.com:993: Capabilities
 - opening message 

I guess we'll have to figure out which messages are too much information and which are not enough.  When it's at its slowest, maybe blocked on some net or disk IO, I'm sure we'll have spare CPU time to let the user know what the delay is, and in times like those the status bar will probably not flicker at all.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Intermittent.  Yay.  But my imap mboxes are large and INBOX has junk.
2.  Open Seamonkey.  Open mailnews (mine doesn't load on start) 
3.  Wait.  Wonder.  Occasionally seethe.

Actual Results:  
The window slows to a massive crawl like rush-hour traffic on the 10.

Expected Results:  
Ideally, no slowdown.  Realistically, some idea of what it's doing so we know it's still doing something meaningful.

Comment 1

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

SeaMonkey v1.0.x is not supported anymore.

Can you reproduce with SeaMonkey v1.1.9 ?

Comment 2

[Bishop Clark (LC957)]

Yes.  

The lack of any kind of User feedback in longer operations still makes one wonder whether it's hung on a DNS hit or something similar.  More - any - feedback as the  state of the system would let a user know what's going on and reassure the user that the application hasn't crashed or so.