438918 - who wants a retention policy of "delete all but the last X messages" with X=30?

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

In the retention policy (folder properties and offline & disk space) the default for the choice of "delete all but the last X messages" has 30 messages as default.

I'm somewhat skeptical anyone uses the choice at all for mail, but if they do, I can't think of anyone using 30... that's nothing. Even for rss feeds, it's way too low. 

We should change it to some much higher number, 1000, 2000, 5000 perhaps? What would be appropriate? Let's leave the people wanting max 30 messages in their account to delete them manually (or at least write in the number).

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

The use cases I can think of where someone would use this option:
 - mailing lists with heavy traffic
 - rss/atom feed

I think 2000 msgs could be a good default, considering you might want to go back a bit in history sometimes.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

And by default i of course mean "default suggestion". Everyone still have to enable it manually.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Attachment: proposed fix

This makes the default suggestion 2000 msgs, only applies to new accounts.

The document.getElementById("retention.keepMsg").value row was duplicated. 

Made this and the related text fields type="number" while I was at it.

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Comment on attachment 335184 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

I tried and tried to develop an opinion about what's a reasonable default, and what's a reasonable increment, but the only opinion I could manage was "I sure would like a client that didn't have this feature, at all." r=me in terms of code, but I'll pile the magic number choice approval onto Bryan's shoulders.

Comment 5

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

Comment on attachment 335184 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

The number of messages seems so wrong, but the simple and clean fix is not yet apparent.

So in my ever scientific manner for finding default numbers I went back to the Inbox of Mr. Kenneth Lay.  Ken has an average Inbox message size of 2.7K (sampling over 1000 messages) and when you multiply that by 2000 messages you get 5.2MB.  The size of 5.2MB seems (by 2008 standards) to be a slightly more reasonable size than what 30 messages leaves; which comes out to be 0.08MB.

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

David: sr ping.

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 335184 [details] [diff] [review]
proposed fix

sorry for the delay, thx, Magnus.

Comment 8

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

changeset:   513:43ca78acecf4
http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/43ca78acecf4

->FIXED