451251 - Message Pane - view with multiple messages selected is blank/empty

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 364896

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Henry Noble]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060414
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.16 (20080708)

In Outlook Express, when I Ctrl-Click on multiple messages that I want to delete, move, etc., the message pane displays the contents of the last clicked message.  This visual feedback is very helpful in ensuring that I have not inadvertently clicked a wrong message.

Thunderbird, in contrast, displays a blank/empty message pane when I select more than one message.  Thus, after the first message, I get no feedback.






Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Select any message in the Inbox.
2.  Hold down the Control key while selecting any other message
3.
Actual Results:  
A blank or empty message pane.

Expected Results:  
The contents of the last message selected.

Those who responded to a question about this in the Thunderbird support forum indicated that the display behavior I observe is what Thunderbird is supposed to do and that there is no configuration alternative.

If so, then this becomes an enhancement (or compatibility) request, rather than a bug report.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #0)
>> Expected Results:  
> The contents of the last message selected.

I do not like this suggestion at all.  The pane must be a reflection of what has been selected.  While I agree that a blank pane is not useful, a single message displayed is misleading and can lead to errors, even possible data loss.  For instance, if only one message from the selection is visible in the thread pane (the rest having been scrolled out), the user may look at the screen and think that only the one message is selected.  Hits delete, boom: suddenly fifteen messages have gone missing.


Some sort of multiple-selection display would certainlybe an improvement.  Perhaps thumbnails of the selected messages, or just a simple count, perhaps with some stats such as:

  14 messages (from 12 senders) are selected