386047 - New Tags Feature Breaks Original Single Label Feature

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 379912

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Ben]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.4 (20070604)

The news tags feature has broken the original label behavior of 1 label/tag per message.  The original label behavior was quite convenient as it allow re-categorizing message very quickly with a single key-press.  The new behavior is quite cumbersome as it add allot of unnecessary keystrokes just to change the category of a single message.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. highlight a message
2. hit the '1' key to make the message important
3. decide that the message is not important and you can work on it later
4. hit the '5' key.

Actual Results:  
* both the important (#1) and later (#5) label text are in the message view under the tag(label) column.
* the message still has the color of the important (#1) tag

Expected Results:  
* the important(#1) label no longer appears in the tag(label) column
* the later (#5) label appears in the tag(label) column
* the message assumes the color of the later (#5) tag

A setting on the options->display->tags tab reactivating the old label behavior would be nice.

Comment 1

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

I'm marking this as a duplicate of bug 379912 which (sorta :) explicitly requests creation of a mail status state/flag/field that has this mutually exclusive behaviour you desire.

Because of the way the tags functionality was implemented, it's not a simple matter to restore the old functionality, so it basically amounts to new functionality.  Additionally, even a hidden preference to completely change the behaviour seems dangerous/potentially very confusing.  So I think the other bug is more appropriate.

If you feel the other bug is not appropriate, feel free to re-open this bug.