677590 - Should mark forward / reply upon close of compose window, not upon send completion, if using mailnews.sendInBackground or Send Later

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Kamens]

When mailnews.sendInBackground is in effect and a user replies to or forwards a message, the message should be marked replied to or forwarded before the message is delivered, not afterward.

This is consistent with the behavior of other mail clients and fixes an important use case that is currently broken... if you reply to or forward a message and then move the message into another folder before the reply / forward has finished being delivered, it won't get the replied / forwarded flag as it should.

File > Send Later has the same problem and should probably be fixed in the same way.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Mark what are your thoughts 

a) stay with current behavior, with delayed marking of message until successful smtp send - but may cause user confusion because the UI does not show message sent upon closing of compose.  (AND morph this to fix message not marked replied if message has been moved to another folder.  Note this is less of an issue if settings put replies in same folder as original)

b) change behavior (perhaps not even technically feasible for imap?), immediately mark message as replied to so that user sees it in UI, but may lead to confusion if ultimately the smtp message send fails (example failed due to message size too large).


> File > Send Later has the same problem and should probably be fixed in the
> same way.
Thanks for pointing this out - yes, it is essentially same issue as mailnews.sendInBackground = true

Jonathan, I've revised the bug summary in part to help avoid confusion on some technical points. But I suspect "a" is what developers will want. Do you care which behavior is chosen, a or b?

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I wonder if the ideal wouldn't be to mark as replied instantly, but clear the replied flag if send fails.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Kamens]

The requirement, in my mind, is that if someone sends a reply, then whether that reply is delivered in the foreground, in the background, or later with Send Unsent Messages, the message that was replied to needs to get the flag, even if it is moved to a different folder before the message is actually delivered.

If the delivery subsequently fails, then it would be nice to undo the flag, but I don't think that's essential, because that's the edge case, whereas successful delivery is the normal case that should be optimized for.

In my add-on, Send Later, I add the forwarded or replied flag to the original message as soon as the user schedules the message for later delivery.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I think adding the flag straight away would be fine (it also gives the user a visual indication that they did reply to the message).

It would be conceivable that we could use gloda to track the message, and flag it in the appropriate place (or unflag it), but like Jonathan says, that's probably not too critical.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for the feedback. I trust the bug summary matches the desired behavior