594701 - New Accounts/Identities not available in From dropdown of compose was opened prior to creating identity

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 341574

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[WBT]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.12) Gecko/20100824 Firefox/3.5.12 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: 2.0.0.24 (20100228) & more recent, on other machine

I have multiple e-mail aliases, thanks to plus addressing and also Craigslist e-mail addresses.  
When composing a message, I often decide that it should be From one of these alias addresses, and open Account settings to change that (the Manage Identities dialog).  However, in order to use this address in the From field of my current message, I have to save it as a draft and then re-open the message.    

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a new message in Composer window. 
2. While the message is open, go back to Thunderbird's main window and open Account Settings.  Add a new e-mail address under Manage Identities (or maybe even a new account). 
Actual Results:  
3. Return to Compose, and notice that the new address is not available.
4. Save the message as draft and close the window.  (Doing this step repeatedly caused me to notice Bug 594042).  
5. Open the draft or choose Edit As New. 
6. Now, but not before, can you select the newly added address for From. 

Expected Results:  
When I add the new identity or account, I expect that it can send some message to the Composer window and add that address to the options, even if just by refreshing that list.

Comment 1

[WBT]

Testing it the other way also gives a weird result.  When I set one of my current identities in the From field and then DELETE that identity, the message is not updated or changed, but still shows the old identity in the From field.  On sending the message, it reports an error: "Sending of message failed.  No sender was specified.  Please fill in your email address in the Mail & Newsgroups account settings."

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

WBT, does this reproduce in version 5 or 6?

Comment 3

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

RESOLVED INCOMPLETE due to lack of response to previous question. If you feel this change was made in error, please respond to this bug with your reasons why.

Comment 4

[WBT]

Sorry, I'm a little behind on bugmail.
Yes, I experienced this bug yesterday, with a fresh download of the latest stable.  I had a new message, added an identity, and had to close the current draft & start over with a new message in order to have access to that freshly-created identity. 
Since a short while after reporting the bug, I've been using Virtual Identity (https://www.absorb.it/virtual-id) as a workaround.  I was a little disappointed to see yesterday (on a new system image) that the bug hasn't been fixed yet.

Comment 5

[WBT]

Also, I don't think RESOLVED INCOMPLETE was the right answer here.  The initial bug report provided more than enough information that you or anybody else could have tested to see what you got.  It's not necessarily reasonable to expect the original reporter to still be around a year later and actively checking/acting on bugmail.  There are plenty of bugs from occasional contributors and even active contributors do sometimes move on or get busy; you don't necessarily need ME to test it a year later.  When I didn't respond right away, a better reaction would've been to test it yourself or open it up for anybody to test, toward either a WORKSFORME or remaining open. 
Thanks for all your contributions to the project...this text is here not to put anyone down, but to suggest a better way to nurture the people and project along. 

WBT

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

confirmed. 

This could be hlped by Bug 323710 - allow creation of new identity from compose window