360886 - Be MUCH more cautious about marking messages as "read" and sending "read" receipts.

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Philip Chalmers]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: version 1.5.0.8 (20061025)

N.B. This may look similar to other reports about marking messages as "read", but:
* it pulls together several symptoms as part of a larger problem, including a security / privacy issue.
* I haven't found similar views to  mine on what should happen.

Problems:
(A) T-bird automatically marks messages as "read" after they've been in the message (preview) pane for X seconds. This may be triggered without the user's knowledge or wishes if the user is distracted for a while (e.g. the phone rings).
(B) The default value of X is 5 - far too short. I often scan messages quickly in order to decide which to deal with first, and a lot get marked "read" if X = 5. Other situations where messages get incorrectly marked "read" if X is small: the next message after one that the user deletes; using the keyboard to pan down through the inbox (experienced users of most software use the keyboard rather than the mouse whenever possible because it's faster).
(D) T-bird sends "read" receipts when messages are marked "read" after being displayed only in the message (preview) pane. If a spammer adds "read receipt required" to a message, the spammer gets confirmation that the target email address exists and is active!

Relatively simple solution:
* Provide most of the following options both globally and per account, to cover situations where users create rules to split incoming messages into separate inboxes.
* Provide options globally and per account which control whether read receipts should be sent automatically, i.e. if the user does not open the message or explicitly mark it "read". The default should be "no".
* Provide options globally and per account which control whether messages should be marked "read" automatically at all. The default should be "no".
* Make the default value of "mark as read  after X seconds" much higher, e.g. 60 seconds.
* Provide a "mark as read  after X seconds" option per account, with a high default, e.g. 60 seconds.
* Never send "read" receipts for email flagged as junk or scam.





Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. See description
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
See description

Expected Results:  
See description - especially very cautious defaults for relevant options and timers.

Comment 1

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Duplicate of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=360886

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Bug 297534 is about completely disabling automatic mark-as-read.  I don't think you're going to see any support for changing the defaults, nor for making the options per-account.

I haven't played around enough with receipts to know whether any of the behavior is actually a problem; there have been a few times when I've been prompted to send a receipt for messages that I thought had already been acknowledged or which I'd already declined to acknowledge.  I've never seen a receipt request from a spam.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

if anyone still see this problem using a current version please comment with your version number and steps to reproduce.

if you no longer see the problem, please cite your version and close the bug or comment

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESO INCO per lack of response to last question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to the bug with your reasons why.