563289 - "Deleted N Messages from Drafts" status message causes user confusion and concern

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 497952

(Thunderbird :: General, defect)

Description

[Sum Yung Guy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.5pre) Gecko/20100430 Thunderbird/3.1b2

While composing mail, users may see the status message "Deleted N Messages from Drafts" from time to time in the status bar, where N may be any number. The message can also be seen in the Activity Manager window. This message causes confusion for users who have their account settings set to "Don't delete any messages", and worry that Thunderbird is auto-deleting their manually saved unsent messages regardless.

The message is related to Auto-save drafts. It seems that each time a mail message is auto-saved, a status message regarding the deletion of the previous auto-save draft is generated.

It is particularly worrisome for users who may have many manually saved drafts, and cannot tell which messages have been deleted, or why.

IMAP users may not notice this status message, since it is normally immediately overwritten by a "[e-mail] is up to date" status message in the status bar. However, it can still be found in the Activity Manager window. POP users will see the message remaining in the status bar.

It seems to the user that this message has appeared at random, since it's not related to a user action such as pressing "send". It's generated at the auto-save timer interval, and then, only if the user has made changes to the mail message in the past interval - so this behavior can seem quite random. There is no indication that it relates only to previous auto-save draft versions rather than manually saved drafts, and there are no status messages regarding the auto-saving of messages that might explain or "balance out" the deletion messages. Adding to this confusion is the fact that there is a cumulative count if no other activity takes place. In other words, if the user has been composing a message for 30 minutes, they might glance at the status bar and notice it reads "Deleted 5 messages from Drafts".

There are numerous complaints about this in help forums, mostly unanswered, eg.:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=1821715
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/drafts_are_being_deleted_how_to_i_stop_this

This occurs in all versions of Thunderbird 3 on the Mac, and most likely on other platforms (haven't tested).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. using default settings, begin composing a mail message, continually making changes.
2. after ten minutes or more, look at the status bar (POP account) and/or the Activity Manager.
3.
Actual Results:  
a message indicating "Deleted N messages from Drafts" appears, causing user concern.

Expected Results:  
a more informative message could be displayed, perhaps distinguishing deletion of previous auto-save versions from deletion of manually saved messages; or perhaps no message at all if deleting a previous version of an auto-save draft.