737887 - open standalone message windows are not restored during session restore / restart

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Spun off from bug 408338

Possibly related to bug 737884, not sure how much would be in common so filed separately just in case.

Messages which were open for reading in a separate window when the application was quit/crashed should be restored during session restore.

Comment 1

[D Holzmman]

I agree!

Now I am opening messages in new tabs instead of separate windows, but too often (once every couple of weeks or so) most (but not all) open message tabs (I often have more than 50) are gone after a crash or restart of Thunderbird.  
Compacting folders seems to raise the risk of this problem happening.
Obviously, this should not happen, but until the problem is banished forever ...

To guard against this, TBird should have a function that saves a list of the subjects/senders/(& other fields?) of all open messages.  That would allow users to find the messages that they were keeping open for future response/action.  (It would be super helpful even for messages that were manually closed.  And for those, Thunderbird should get something like Firefox's "Recently Closed Tabs" list).

Also, TBird could automatically tag all open messages with a tag called "open", and remove the tag when a message is manually closed.  That way, messages closed by crashes or during restarts would still have the "open" tag, and users could find them by searching for the tag.

Comment 2

[Walter K.]

This happens on Windows as well (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8). I've had lost tabs after quitting the application while it was minimized but that does not occur every time.

Comment 3

[D Holzmman]

It happened again!  Lost all but 1 or 2 open tabs.  TB 31.4.0  Windows 7
I had just moved thousands of messages from two (sub?)folders to two new subfolders.
Shut down machine.  Went to bed.  Woke up.  Gone.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to D Holzmman from comment #3)
> It happened again!  Lost all but 1 or 2 open tabs.  

Because this bug is not about tabs, I have opened bug 1412606

Comment 5

[David Rosenstrauch]

Any movement on this bug? I just experienced this issue today. (X crashed while I had a whole bunch of open TBird windows and I lost them.)

Comment 6

[D Holzmman]

I use tabs not windows, and similar issue with tabs is in Bug #1412606 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1412606
I still think an "IamOPEN" flag (visible or not) should be set on a message when the message is opened in a new tab or window, and only cleared when the message tab or window is closed by the user. That would allow scanning for open, but not displayed, messages.

Comment 7

[insaner]

I just had bug #539939 / bug #493980 happen, and stand to lose 10 open windows that are helping me keep track of a big project I'm working on. My workaround is to take a screenshot of the windowlist from my taskbar and then manually scan through my emails to reopen them (hoping that none of the emails share a subject line with other emails, so it doesn't cause more confusion and work to restore my windows) -- tough luck on any composer windows.

Thunderbird 68.11.0 on linux fc31 x86_64.

Comment 8

[Karl Baumann]

My open windows have never been restored on any of my four computers. Like a lot of other users, this is a critical failure for me. It is very disruptive to my work flow and is frustrating. Microsoft's force-feeding of Win10 updates {eye roll} greatly exacerbates this problem, in addition to the occasional Thunderbird crash. This problem has honestly sent me searching for a new email client on several occasions. The problem is that even with this fundamental flaw, Thunderbird is still, so far, the best fit for my needs, with its high level of configurability. If someone can rectify this flaw (or show me what I am doing wrong), then Thunderbird will be a great fit for my needs, and I can work around anything else. If it were not for this long-standing issue, or if I knew that it would be fixed soon, I would be honored to become a regular supporter of this project. Thank you!