510272 - Provide option to choose a user-defined startup folder when Thunderbird starts (like 'Default startup directory' option in address book)

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

I would like to see the option to choose a startup folder in Thunderbird.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Thunderbird.
2. The program will display the folder than was last open.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

The fact that always the last folder is opened comes from the session restore feature recently implemented. This comes close to bug 506526, which asks for a user option to disable session restore, but in this case just the Inbox of the default account would be taken rather than an arbitrarily specified folder.

There is also bug 504986 on the start page which may be relevant here.

Comment 3

[Stéphane Ascoët]

You can't imagine how this features annoys me in my daily live

Comment 5

[Jack]

Sorry Wayne. You misunderstand my issue. The bug you mention is to open Thunderbird to a specific account. I know how to get it to open to the account I want it to. My issue is I want it to open to a specific folder, not the last folder viewed.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Yes, there is a slight difference in the desired result of the two bugs, but under the hood I believe the changes required are the same.

https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-us/thunderbird/addon/manually-sort-folders/ provides this feature (but which AIUI is currently broken in version 68).

Comment 7

[Jack]

Does not work with Thunderbird 70.0b3

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Jack, thank you for politely disagreeing with me. Having reread bug 442826 another half dozen times, I have come to a better understanding of what that bug is about (accurate bug summaries really do matter). I agree it's not the same issue.

That said, I took a serious look at other bug reports and I am shocked to not find duplicates. The issue is discussed in Bug 321409 - When starting Thunderbird, it should position on the inbox. Also, some similar bugs have been duped to Bug 506526 - there should be a pref to turn off session restore

Comment 12

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

This is obviously useful for many scenarios both enterprise and private. In fact, I think it's a basic requirement that users should be able to choose freely which folder they want to see when starting Thunderbird (or, if no startup folder chosen, show the last used folder as we do now).

I think just allowing the user to choose any folder as a startup folder will be the most simple, universal and sustainable solution covering this, requiring just a single pref. As a proof of concept, I have implemented this for the address book (a simple checkbox 'Default startup directory' in folder context menu), and everyone is happy. If unchecked, it goes back to remember last used. If there's no last, choose a reasonable default like inbox of default account.

Comment 13

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

.

Comment 14

[Jack]

Manually sort Folders is an app that allows you to select the start up folder. But, this has not worked with newer versions of Thunderbird. However, it started working in the last update. Lets hope it continues to work with future updates.