599266 - Ambiguous and confusing SAVE / CANCEL message when I detach an attachment file from an email

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[John_Ha]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100914 Firefox/3.6.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100915 Thunderbird/3.1.4

1  Open an email which has one or more attachments
2  right click an attachment > select DETACH > detach the file
3  A window labeled CONFIRM then opens with the following confusing text:

The following attachments have been successfully saved and will now be permanently deleted from this message:
fred.txt 

This action cannot be undone. Do you wish to continue?

   SAVE    CANCEL

4  SAVE and CANCEL are very confusing.  If I want to delete the attachment from the message, I choose SAVE!!  Viewed alternatively, if I choose SAVE, I delete the attachment!!  

If I want to keep the attachment on the message I need to choose CANCEL!!

This is very, very confusing.

The window message needs to be changed so that the save of the attachment is separated out - it is done and finished and the user cannot affect it any more.  

The choice of button can then clearly relate to what the user needs to choose - either to keep the attachment with the message, or to delete the attachment from the message.  

For example, I suggest a better message would be:

The following attachment(s) have been successfully saved. (ie separate this)
fred.txt

Do you wish to delete the attachment(s) permanently from this message?  This action cannot be undone.

   YES     NO

or better, the buttons should be labelled

     DELETE ATTACHMENT(S)     KEEP ATTACHMENT(S)

This is then completely clear.
 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1  Open an email which has one or more attachments
2  right click an attachment > select DETACH > detach the file
3  A window opens with the following confusing text:
Actual Results:  
As above

Expected Results:  
As above

None

Comment 1

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

Isn't a dupe, but this same issue is mentioned on bug #530111 comment #8

We should assign as an localization bug?

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Is this still an issue?

Comment 3

[Arthur K. (he/him)]

Attachment: detach-message.png

So, in 89.0b3, I get the follow dialogue box. An OK button (the user wants to detach the file from the message and it'll be a permanent action) or Cancel (the user does not wish to proceed with this action, leave things as they are).

I'd say that the warning text at the top should perhaps be changed, for the sake of clarity, from:

The following attachments have been successfully saved and will now be permanently deleted from this message:

to:

The following attachment(s) will be saved and then permanently deleted from this message:

As it stands, invoking the Detach action spits out "The following attachments have been successfully saved" which implies something HAS already happened when in fact nothing has YET happened. So perhaps just a change of wording/tense is what's needed here.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Arthur K. [He/Him] from comment #3)

...
As it stands, invoking the Detach action spits out "The following attachments have been successfully saved" which implies something HAS already happened when in fact nothing has YET happened. So perhaps just a change of wording/tense is what's needed here.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screencast (Detach.mp4): Detach workflow - after saving, confirm detach

Thanks Wayne for your tireless efforts to get old bugs closed!

(In reply to Arthur K. [He/Him] from comment #3)

Created attachment 9221005 [details]
As it stands, invoking the Detach action spits out "The following attachments have been successfully saved" which implies something HAS already happened when in fact nothing has YET happened. So perhaps just a change of wording/tense is what's needed here.

Unless we're doing something different, the alert is 100% technically correct, and coming exactly at the right time.

As seen in attached screencast, this is detach workflow:

• Trigger "Detach" action an attachments
• Get OS prompt to SAVE files - choose file name and/or folder, then save (so files have been saved now).
• After successful save (sic!), get TB alert to permanently delete attachments from message.

It's a bit unusual that we get prompted half way through the action, but it does make sense if you think about it. If you'd have to confirm this serious warning upfront, then cancel SAVE thereafter - maybe you'll panic that your attachments are gone for good because you already confirmed deletion but did not save them anywhere.

So if anyone really wants the prompt to come first, you'd have to roll this out in a clean RFE considering all the possibilities including CANCEL SAVE after the upfront warning.

What irritates me more is that the prompt does not even mention the word detach - with 100s of prompts we might be getting, that's not helpful. Alert title should have something like "Detach attachments". Again, that would be a new bug.

Public interest on this outdated bug has been near-zero - time to close this down.