640930 - collapsed message summaries don't show when local synchronization is not enabled

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Brian Murrell]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.10 Chromium/10.0.648.127 Chrome/10.0.648.127 Safari/534.16
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.14) Gecko/20110223 Lightning/1.0b2 Mnenhy/0.8.3 Thunderbird/3.1.8

One of the great new features of TB3 is the collapsed message summaries.  It's nice to be able to read a whole thread at a time.

It doesn't work however if the folder you are reading is not a folder on which local synchronization has been enabled.

I can't see any reason why the message bodies can't be loaded on demand, when the collapsed thread is selected even if local synchronization is disabled.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

iirc, not displaying in this context was a design point.

Comment 2

[Brian Murrell]

Why?  What was the design point?  Doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

If I remember correctly, the collapsed thread summaries rely on the processing code that is part of the global database. If you don't have copies of the messages stored locally, then there's nothing available to be able to display the summaries of the bodies (we'd have to stream from the online store, which would likely be very slow).

Comment 4

[David Ascher (:davida)]

Mark is correct -- while we'd of course like to show the summaries in all cases, my understanding is that IMAP is slow enough that to do on-demand fetches of bodies would be very slow for most users, but also would interfere with other IMAP operations.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

There is the option of showing the message snippet if gloda doesn't have the message body (the snippet is what we show for the new mail alert for messages - it's persisted in the .msf files). It's limited in size but it's a potential fallback.

See http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mail/base/content/mailWidgets.xml#2172

I doubt the core Thunderbird developers are interested in doing this, but an extension could do it, or a contributor could propose a patch.