356015 - Log "Mark All Read" action in Activity Manager

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[turningoff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

There should be a confirmation guard on mark all read.  I keep messages marked as not read when they are in my to do list, so I often have to togged them back to not read.  It is too easy to slip back a line and accidently mark the entire folder as read, thus losing all that information.  It needs a confirmation panel.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. as above
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I think this would prove very unpopular.  A better solution would be to make the action undoable, which is bug 65775.

Comment 2

[turningoff]

I figured out why mark all can happen accidentally.  Normally, if the user right clicks on a message line, then slides down to Mark, As Read comes up immediately to the right or left, so you just slide over and click.
However, sometimes instead of As Read, All Read is immediately to the right or left.  The skimming brain sees the initial A and clicks.
I'm unable to figure out what positioning of message lines causes All Read to show up this way.  I'm not even sure the positioning is reproducible, because I thought I saw it a couple of times, but couldn't make it happen again.

Comment 3

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

CC'ing UI guru...

Comment 4

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

Dialogs like these are called "speed bumps" and should only be used if we feel that the action isn't going to be an often used one.  For example ( Delete Account ) is an action that we don't expect to be used often and therefore makes a lot of sense to have a speed bump to make sure people aren't doing that by accident.

This action, Mark All Read, on the other hand is a more often used action and so I can't see adding a speed bump to it as it would frustrate those who use it often.

We could really improve our notification of this action and make this "Mark All Read" action specifically logged in the Activity Manager such that an undo, via bug 65775, is possible.

Comment 5

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

(In reply to comment #4)
> We could really improve our notification of this action and make this "Mark All
> Read" action specifically logged in the Activity Manager such that an undo, via
> bug 65775, is possible.

Morphing bug summary, and confirming.

Comment 7

[xracoonx]

(In reply to Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw] from comment #4)
> Dialogs like these are called "speed bumps" and should only be used if we
> feel that the action isn't going to be an often used one.  For example (
> Delete Account ) is an action that we don't expect to be used often and
> therefore makes a lot of sense to have a speed bump to make sure people
> aren't doing that by accident.
> 
> This action, Mark All Read, on the other hand is a more often used action
> and so I can't see adding a speed bump to it as it would frustrate those who
> use it often.
> 
> We could really improve our notification of this action and make this "Mark
> All Read" action specifically logged in the Activity Manager such that an
> undo, via bug 65775, is possible.

There is another common way to avoid such speed bumps: a checkbox in the dialog so that it will not show up again. Seems like a good way to let it up to the user to decide on the mix of speed and safety.

On the other hand, the standard undo function does no seem like a good remedy because

(1) it does not survive a restart of thunderbird in case one has not noticed the change happening before
(2) undo is hidden by default (at least on windows)

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

December 2008 Bug 65775 delivered the ability to undo Mark All Read.