548816 - Star and tag not shown for nested message in collapsed threaded view

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 622779

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Dietmar May]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.8) Gecko/20100216 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.2

In threaded mode, with a (all) thread collapsed, there is no visual indicator of any tags or stars on the thread, therefore important information is lost.

Tbird should display a tag color and/or star on the top level message (which has the + next to it) when the thread is collapsed.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a message thread with at least 2 messages (ie. create a message and reply to it. Drag both messages to the same folder).
2. Expand the thread if needed by pressing the + symbol.
3. Right-click the nested (second) message, and select Tag -> 1. Follow-up (or whatever your Tag1 is called).
4. Right-click the same nested message, and select Mark -> Add Star.
5. Collapse the thread. 
Note that the thread has no star, and no tag. This means that when scanning a folder for, say, follow-up or important items, it's not possible to find them without expanding all threads, which can easily quadruple or sextuple the number of items to scroll through.
Actual Results:  
Can't see when collapsed thread has tags or stars.

Expected Results:  
Top level thread should show tag, star. When thread is expanded, the tag and star should be visually removed and shown on the correct nested thread.

Comment 1

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

I believe this is really an enhancement; the flaw is that Thunderbird is missing a (potentially) useful feature.
The difficulty in implementing this is chiefly in design, I'd guess; inadvertently making someone think that a thread head message has a tag or star is not good, so we would have to e.g. fade out tags and stars for collapsed thread view, in some fashion.

Is there/will there be an extension that implements this as a preliminary step? (Nothing shows up in quick AMO search.)

Note also that selecting a collapsed thread will display a thread summary in the message preview pane with tags and stars displayed per message.

Comment 2

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

This looks like a subset of bug 560518 -- do you want to fold this enhancement into that report? (i.e. resolve this bug as "duplicate")

Comment 3

[Dietmar May]

Hmmm, I definitely see the overlap, though I'm not sure this is a subset of the other: that is, I'm not sure it should be dependent either on the decision of whether to resolve 560518, nor the timing.

And while I agree with the submitter's suggestion (1) that date should be the latest date, not the date of the first e-mail in the thread; I don't agree with (3) From and Recipients (I don't see any way to condense possibly dozens of people into 1 line); and I'm also not sure I would support (2) displaying sum of all messages in the thread - certainly I wouldn't want to tie this fix to that one! (I appreciate the benefit of sorting by size, but I feel that housecleaning because a mailbox quota has been exceeded is a much different type of task - and of a different priority to fix - than scanning a folder to see whether an e-mail needs attention or follow-up.)

There are other fields which could perhaps be handled similarly to STAR - ie. attachment; but probably most should not.