35448 - autosave to forms (slightly different from wallet feature)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 16360

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[David Pearson]

This next suggestion (autosave) is a suggestions to both forms and to the 
MailNews compostion window.  I think I've had this happen to me before and that 
is that I am typing an email (in the mail compostion window) and then the brower 
crashes (or a power failure), I have to type everything over again and I often 
find that if I have to type something over again, my heart or creativity won't 
be fully into the composition the second time.  I suppose I could always press 
"save" (in mail compose) but if I am engrossed in my writting, I might forget.  
The program should do that (autosave) for me.  The same thing with forms but 
more can go wrong with forms, since it may also be a brower crash, power failure 
but may be a result of a server (cgi script error) or I forgot to put in a field 
in the form, and am asked to press the back key, and to find the contents of 
what you wrote may or may not be there.  This is similar to the new wallet 
feature (even it doesn't offer autosave, at least not yet).  The wallet feature 
to me seems a bit to permanent since wallet offers the ability to save the name 
address, credit cards (saved from a form then a fill to similar forms) so we 
don't have to enter stuff again (like at amazon.com & other sites).  No what I 
am talking about is only temporary as the contents of the form that I am typing 
now.  Once it is actually sent (assuming there are no errors in the cgi server 
script), I won't need the contents that I have written anymore so what I have 
written could be auomaticly deleted.

Comment 1

[Sean Richardson]

*** Bug 35449 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[David Pearson]

Sorry about the dup in message Bug 35449, it looked like the cgi script was 
hanging and nothing was happening so I sent it again and it looked like it was 
hanging so I decided to give up.  Again sorry for the dup in Bug 35449

I have a question? Should the Component field be kept the way it is as "HTML 
form controls" or should it be listed as "autofill"?

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The forms thing seems very complex (and not necessarily desireable IMO); but the 
mail autosave might be doable. Moving to MailNews.

Gerv

Comment 4

[rods (gone)]

marking as later

Comment 5

[Blake Ross]

reopening and marking Future...

Comment 6

[ckritzer (gone)]

->lchiang

Comment 7

[ckritzer (gone)]

Whoops, sorry, that should have gone to esther...

Comment 8

[wazow]

I think this is system independent. The original idea about forms indeed seems
to be slightly peculiar. Not that it would not be useful, but there lots of
issues related: security/privacy of data and how to arrange it in user interface.

However for mail messages this seems to be an urgent need. People are having
discussions in various bugs about backing up whole mailboxes (which can be done
by third party software moderately succesfully), but autosave for mailmessages
cannot be workaround. Some people type messages which are as long as
wordprocessor documents. I guess nobody questions utility of autosave in
wordprocessors.

Comment 9

[wazow]

Forgot: I guess the summary is misleading. Should be: autosave of mail messages
incompose window (or similar). Sorry for spam.

Comment 10

[Andrew Hagen]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 16360 ***

Comment 11

[Joshua Prowse]

This is not a duplicate of 16360, as marked.  16360 exclusively deals with 
autosave in Mail/News whereas this bug also deal with autosave of form 
elements in the browser.  

Comment 12

[Andrew Hagen]

"autosave of form elements in the browser."

That's bug 156765. That bug has a better description than this one.