577690 - Generic message is predominant, making it impossible to see progress of an operation.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Markus Pfeiffer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100628 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.6
Build Identifier: Downloading message... -vs- Downloading x of y in {folder}

When copying a large number of e-mails from one folder to another folder (on a different server), the message "Downloading message..." is shown in the status bar for most of the time. The message "Downloading x of y in {folder}" is shown occasionally, but far to quickly to be entirely readable. The progress bar on the lower right shows a spin animation.

This makes it impossible for the user to see how far the copy job has progressed. It would be preferable to keep showing "Downloading x of y in {folder}" over the more generic "Downloading message...". This would allow the user to get a rough feel for the progress, even if Thunderbird cannot determine the progress (in bytes, seconds remaining or whatever).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Select a folder containing several hundreds e-mails (on imap-server A).
2. Drag & Drop the folder into the inbox of another account (on imap-server B).
3. Try to gauge the progress of the operation by the messages shown in the status bar and the progress bar.
Actual Results:  
The message "Downloading message..." is shown most of the time. The message "Downloading x of y in {folder}" is shown far too briefly to be readable. The progress bar does not reflect the progress of the overall operation.

Expected Results:  
The message "Downloading x of y in {folder}" is shown most of the time. The progress bar reflects the progress (% of e-mails downloaded/transferred). Ideally a rough estimate of the remaining time should be displayed.

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

How about using the Activity manager ?

Comment 2

[Markus Pfeiffer]

To be honest, I've never even noticed the Activity Manager until now. I'm not sure how many other people ever do. For me, the main source of information (until now) was the status bar.
Instead of changing the status bar behavior, it might be enough to make the Activity Manager more noticeable, like adding a link label to the status area, like "Open Activity Manager" or "Show current activity in Activity Manager".

Either way, thank you very much for the tip, very useful :)