479484 - Activity Manager messages are too generic - remove / do not log sync activity related to activity from other mail clients

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Saul Tannenbaum]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2) Gecko/20081201 Firefox/3.1b2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090218 Lightning/1.0pre Thunderbird/3.0b2

My current top 5 Activity Manager messages are:

account_name is up to date 2:08 PM
Total number of messages downloaded: 1
account_name is up to date 2:08 PM
Total number of messages downloaded: 10
account_name is up to date 2:08 PM
Total number of messages downloaded: 12
account_name is up to date 2:08 PM
Total number of messages downloaded: 3
account_name is up to date 2:08 PM
Total number of messages downloaded: 5

Yes, they are all time stamped at 2:08. 

There isn't enough detail in the messages to distinguish one activity from the other. If they're all the same, why aren't they aggregated into one summary message? If they're different, there should be enough information displayed (for example, folder name) to understand why one activity is different from the other.

There are also messages that don't appear to be related to user actions directly. For example, I saw a "deleted 7 messages" for a mailbox from
which I didn't delete any messages with this instance of Thunderbird.
I _speculate_ that what happened is this: I deleted those messages last
night from another mail client and when this instance of Thunderbird 
connected to the server, it sync'ed up its caches and had to delete
those messages, giving that message. Reporting messages deleted 
disconnected from the actual activity of deleting the messages isn't
good feedback, and can be a bit scary.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Look at Activity Manager
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Generic messages that are not sufficiently informative.

Expected Results:  
Be more specific about about the activity that is being reported.

Comment 1

[David Ascher (:davida)]

It feels like there are two issues here.

1) activity manager messages probably want to be "grouped" in some way, where even things that are distinct events from the software's POV are grouped from a user's POV (e.g. the fact that all of those notifications are timestamped with the same minute is a human grouping concept).  One challenge of course is that if we move to the (desired) state where you can undo actions, then excessive grouping won't actually be helpful if ungrouping isn't possible.  I'm not sure what the right outcome is there.

2) synchronizing IMAP deletes made on other devices probably shouldn't show up in the activity log.

Comment 2

[Saul Tannenbaum]

Thanks for these comments, they've helped me clarify my thinking and turn this into a specific proposal, which, in turn, makes this one issue.

I propose that activity manager messages have a standard syntax in the form of:

<timestamp> <action> <object or objects> <reason>

For example, in the case of the synchronizing other deletes:

11:00 <Thunderbird deleted> <17 messages in its local cache> because <those messages no longer exist on the server>.

This would be as specific as possible, providing good useful information out of the activity manager.

Because all messages would have a standard structure, the human ability to intuitively pattern match would provide a rough grouping structure to the eye. With this approach, there's no need to ungroup when there is an undo.

Comment 3

[Mark Richards]

Since updating to Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1 the Activity Manager is reporting:

"The current command did not succeed.  The mail server for account [redacted] responded: access denied"

This is of no use whatsoever as it tells nothing as to what command failed.  

Generic messages are fine providing they are useful enough to lead one to either (a) enable an option to add detail (fidelity) to the messaging or (b) look elsewhere.

A message such as this example does neither.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to David Ascher (:davida) from comment #1)
> It feels like there are two issues here.
> 
> 1) activity manager messages probably want to be "grouped" in some way,
> where even things that are distinct events from the software's POV are
> grouped from a user's POV (e.g. the fact that all of those notifications are
> timestamped with the same minute is a human grouping concept).  ...

this is covered by davida's bug 493397

> 2) synchronizing IMAP deletes made on other devices probably shouldn't show
> up in the activity log.

so I am morphing this bug to cover #2