510254 - Activity manager does not show when new mail was last checked for

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[brandt24]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.202.0 Safari/532.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Thunderbird/3.0b3

Whenever I launch Thunderbird and have no new messages, the activity manager displays nothing. But I would expect it to confirm that it did indeed check for new messages, but had none to retrieve.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Make sure you have no new messages to get.
2. Open Thunderbird.
3. Open activity manager.
Actual Results:  
The activity manager displays nothing.

Expected Results:  
I would expect the manager to confirm that it did indeed check for new messages, but had none to retrieve.

I have two IMAP accounts.
And sorry in advance if this is not a bug.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Activity manager doesn't currently show anything - checking new mail being one of them. I guess adding a line for when we last checked for new mail could be useful - therefore changing summary and changing to enhancement.

Comment 2

[brandt24]

This seems to be a bug instead of a "feature".

Comment 3

[brandt24]

As per discussion in Bug 512992.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This seems to be a bug instead of a "feature".

I disagree. Without showing the last check for new mail there is no loss of function - either in Thunderbird or Activity Manager, especially as we had never thought of showing the last check for new mail until you raised this report. Therefore resetting to enhancement as it will be an enhancement to what the activity manager currently supplies.

Comment 5

[brandt24]

Oh, come on, think a little from the end users perspective. What is the idea of the whole manager thing if it does not reflect such basic information? Right now you will be left with the impression (underline the word impression) that e-mail was retrieved from lets say 2 accounts only and the rest - doodles. If you don't wanna call it a bug, then call it a tragic mistake in planning. "Enhancmement". :D But hey, no worries, I am gonna file a request for an actual enhancement for the AM in a mear moment.

Comment 6

[brandt24]

Attachment: screenshot

So how would you interpret this?

Comment 7

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

(In reply to comment #5)
> Oh, come on, think a little from the end users perspective. What is the idea of
> the whole manager thing if it does not reflect such basic information? 

I agree that it doesn't give a good perspective of what is happening.

> If
> you don't wanna call it a bug, then call it a tragic mistake in planning.

Sure it's a bug against the design.  But this is an enhancement against what was implemented because the design was implemented and that's what you see.  I think we're splitting hairs :)

Also, just wanted to say thanks for filing these bugs and don't pay too much attention to the flag setting in bugzilla.  It's more important to be helpful, persuasive, and convincing than to get the right flag set ;-)