Closed Bug 594042 Opened 14 years ago Closed 13 years ago

Thunderbird reports sending message when saving draft

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

x86
Windows 7
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 255050

People

(Reporter: firstpeterfourten, Unassigned)

Details

(Keywords: polish, ux-consistency)

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8 When saving a draft of a message I wasn't finished composing, Thunderbird told me that it was sending the message. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Compose a draft of a semi-long message. 2. Be sure to have your account settings to save the draft in a "Drafts" folder on the IMAP mail account you're using for this test. 3. Save the draft, e.g. with CTRL+S. 4. Notice the progress bar reporting the progress of saving it to the remote Drafts folder. 5. Before it finishes saving, press the "X" button to close the window. Actual Results: A dialog box pops up with the following text: "Thunderbird is currently in the process of sending a message. Would you like to wait until the message has been sent before quitting or quit now? Wait | Quit" Expected Results: If nothing else, change the text of the dialog so that it doesn't tell me it's sending the message. As I haven't finished the draft, I don't want it sent...but should I choose Wait or Quit to accomplish that? It unnecessarily scares the user.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
This also happens when the draft is auto-saving and that fails. It's even more concerning then!
I had this happen several times today when the e-mail was auto-saving and failed to copy to the IMAP drafts folder. It's exceptionally concerning when you're looking at a half-baked message and get a popup to say "sending failed." WAIT! I DIDN'T WANT TO SEND!!!
Priority: -- → P1
Priority: P1 → --
I voted this up in priority (without changing severity) because I do believe this is a major issue that is blocking adoption for some and causing others to change back. It's a very simple change, but having users see a "Your message failed to send" pop up as they're working on an early draft of an important e-mail, gives them the idea that this mail program is out of their control and may behave very unpredictably. This is when they think it's actually sending, as it says, and it's not easy to isolate or figure out what's really happening to bring a person to this bug. People ask me about open source software and in particular the applications I use. When I tell them about bugs like this, they say that would be a big issue for them..."but of course, being an open source community, don't things like that get fixed quickly once they're reported and isolated?" Apparently not, and then people are even less willing to adopt because they think Thunderbird is a 'dead' or inactive project. So in the eyes of users who encounter this bug, we have unpredictable, uncontrollable software that's not well maintained. I don't think that's what Thunderbird really is, but other users will and do get that perception. This is a very important UX bug and it should be easy to fix for someone that knows how...I'm quite surprised to see Ludovic's response.
Also, even if you [gen.] think this bug is unimportant, one rating that you disagree with cannot really be called "abuse." Abuse would be if a person intentionally misused the system in a systematic way on many bugs, not if a person is making a good-faith effort that you disagree with on a single bug.
I had a case today where it DID actually send the message (or save it to the Sent folder) instead of saving it to Drafts, without reporting an error or closing the message window, and without being told to send. Thankfully the message was mostly complete, so the 'real' version was sent out a few minutes later, but I'm now very skeptical of Thunderbird and am hesitant to use it for any sensitive or important messages. Can somebody please look into this bug?
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 13 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
This bug is still happening in Version 31 after installing Ubuntu 14.04 (actually LXLE). I had not previously seen the issue in many years of using T/B on Ubuntu based distros. I think the same bug takes several forms including saving a draft, sending the finalised email and during auto-save. It seems worse when using T/B after resuming from Suspended state. We really need a fix for this as it undermines the use of the application.
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