369039 - When I use "Edit As New" on an draft message and save it, a new copy should be saved

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 321355

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Jamie Nettles]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: 1.5.0.9 (20061207)

If I right-click a message in the "Drafts" folder and select "Edit As New...", edit the message, then save the message, Thunderbird will overwrite the original message.  This perhaps makes sense if I click the "Edit Draft" button, since the implication is that I am editing the draft message and would therefore want to replace the old draft with the new draft.  But "Edit As New..." clearly implies a *new* message, not an updated copy of an old message.

As a real-world use case, every month I send out 30 or so emails, many of which are close duplicates with just a few names and dates changed.  I create the original messages and my partner reviews and edits them.  For a year or so now I've been using Thunderbird to do this just fine by editing one draft message and saving it multiple times with slightly different text and subject lines.  I recently upgraded and the upgrade broke my ability to operate this way.

As alternative, the "Save As" menu item could save the message fresh without overwriting the old message.  This currently does not work.  Another alternative would be to allow a draft message to be copied to the folder that it already exists in (duplicated).  Or cut and pasted.  Neither of these work.

It seems like the semantically correct thing to do is for "Edit Draft" to work as it currently does (overwrite old message) and for "Edit As New..." to work as it used to (create new message) when applied to messages in the Drafts folder.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select message in Drafts folder
2. Click on "Edit As New..."
3. Edit message
4. Save message

Actual Results:  
The original draft message is gone.  The "Edit As New..." actually was "Edit As Old..."

Expected Results:  
Both the old and the new message should coexist.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Your use case is what Templates are for. Anyway, this is a dupe.