436939 - "Get all Messages" while "Get Mail" reports error "This folder is being processed. Please wait until processing is complete to get messages."

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 392680

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Mitra Ardron]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008051202 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: version 3.0a1 (2008050714)

If you Get All Messages, while Get Mail is running it reports. "This folder is being processed. Please wait until processing is complete to get messages." 


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Click Get Mail
2. Click Get All New Messages
Actual Results:  
Alert appears: This folder is being processed. Please wait until processing is complete to get messages.

Expected Results:  
It should just Get All New Mail in the remaining accounts, 

The problem with this somewhat obscure behavior is that it is very easy to hit "Get Mail' when you are aiming for the drop-down arrow to its right.  An error message then appears when the user actually thinks they are doing the right thing.  I think it would be more useful if "Get All New Messages" just went ahead and fetched the mail on all non-active Accounts. 

The only problem with that, is that sometimes Firefox jams on an account, for whatever reason, in which case the Alert is useful to show something is wrong, but in that case the Alert could be more useful (ideally a prompt to unjam, disconnect and try again)

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mitra, dupe of bug 392680?

Comment 2

[Mitra Ardron]

Its similar - maybe the same cause, or fix - that bug is more of a UI issue with double-clicking, while this one relates to Get Mail and Get All New Messages interfering. 

- Mitra

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I fail to see the difference.  duping. 

I did an extensive search on "folder being processed" including bugs closed WFM, expired, etc. and I get bug 110289, bug 206616 and bug 152675. only bug 152675 is open - perhaps this issue relates back to bug 152675.

Comment 4

[Mitra Ardron]

There doesn't seem to be a relationship to bug 152675 which - if I read it correctly - relates to timeouts and bugs with code, rather than a bug with the UI. 

I still don't believe its the same as bug 292680, which is about DOUBLE CLICKING, while this bug is about clicking twice on seperate occasions. 

I've also posted bug 466933 which relates to a similar problem coming back from sleep - but in that case a problem that requires restarting shredder to fix.

Comment 5

[Joe Konecny]

It would be very nice if messages such as these, if they must be shown, could be in a status bar somewhere instead of forcing you to click ok in a dialog box.

Comment 6

[Martin Trautmann]

This bug is really annoying.

It does ALWAYS appear, but for different conditions:

- compacting
- deletig
- downloading
- connecting

Without reproducability I had this messages recently when I tried to get new mail, but same again now: TB does not tell me what's going on. There's NO status report, other than a temporary info within the footer of the window, which is lost quickly after.

Currently I have to quit TB (version 2.0.0.19 (20081209), Mac OSX) in order to make it run again.

This message is even shown when selecting a completely empty folder - probably processing a level above, but not telling so.

The less you can do against this dialog and the more it is shown without providing any info what is going one, the more annoying it is.

I'd welcome
- not an interactive dialog (it appears twice most of the times since I get mail from two different accounts)
- more details what actually did prevent any operation
- status info how get mail does proceed, e.g. showing a timeout, a temporary server malfunction, an incorrect passwort attempt etc.

Comment 7

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Changed Platform and OS, because it happenas also on Linux.

Comment 9

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Its similar - maybe the same cause, or fix - that bug is more of a UI issue
> with double-clicking, while this one relates to Get Mail and Get All New
> Messages interfering. 
> 
> - Mitra

I think that this issue is closely a dupe of bug #392680 as affirmed by Wayne in comment #3.
The behaviour is the same: get new mail of an account while get new mail of the same account is ongoing.

Comment 10

[David :Bienvenu]

> The only problem with that, is that sometimes Firefox jams on an account, for
> whatever reason, in which case the Alert is useful to show something is wrong,
> but in that case the Alert could be more useful (ideally a prompt to unjam,
> disconnect and try again)

This is really the difficulty - we may mistakenly think the pop3 server is busy, when it is not, and the user would have no way of knowing that unless we told them somehow. modal alerts exacerbate the issue, but we need to fix the underlying issue as well.

Comment 11

[lopthopman-bugz]

(In reply to comment #10)
> This is really the difficulty - we may mistakenly think the pop3 server is
> busy, when it is not, and the user would have no way of knowing that unless we
> told them somehow. modal alerts exacerbate the issue, but we need to fix the
> underlying issue as well.

Perhaps the button press can be remembered until after the busy period is over.  That is the main UI problem, that the user is burdened with the an internal busy state.

Comment 12

[David :Bienvenu]

The trick is knowing when the busy period is over. The problem occurs when we don't notice that the busy period is over.

Comment 13

[Mitra Ardron]

There seem to be a number of related bugs 
* Internal busy state when the folder isn't really busy - especially when returning from sleep.
* Unhelpful error message that doesn't explain that there's a Pop session going on (or even that it thinks there is a Pop sesssion going on).
* That status messages also aren't at all helpful since they tend to get overwritten when anything else happens, and don't indicate WHICH account is connecting to Pop etc etc. 
* And then the question of whether a modal dialogue is appropriate at all when Pop is requested, but already happening.

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I'm convinced the central/original point of this bug, comment 0, is a dup of bug 392680. 

Good observations in comment 6 and comment 13, but likely covered in other bugs. See bug 392680 comment 12 for a query for (some of) these bugs. And if you think any are missing, please file a new bug.

duping