Closed Bug 82998 Opened 23 years ago Closed 15 years ago

Send messages go into unsent mail folder before being sent

Categories

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 440794

People

(Reporter: gareth.king, Unassigned)

References

Details

Currently if online, when messages are sent, the mail compose window stays open.
If this is a large message (e.g. with Attachments) it can stay open a long time.
Would prefer it if the compose window closed as soon as I 'sent' a message.

I think an intuitive way of doing this would be to put messages to be sent into
the unsent folder, and that they stay there until sent. This is the behaviour if
you are offline, if online, the messages would be sent immeditately from the
unsent folder.
The window stays open so that if the sending operation fails the user hasn't
lost their message. Moving the message into Unsent Messages would be a good
alternative though. The problem is that if the sending operation fails, the user
might wonder where their message has gone. A solution to this would be to tell
the user where it's been put in the error dialogue. Adding "Your message has
been filed in Unsent Messages on Work Account." (or whatever) on to the end of
the dialogue text should suffice.

Marking NEW, changing severity to enhancement (since the current method does
actually work) and changing Platform and OS to All. I'm almost certain this
doesn't belong in Mail Window Front End, but I'm leaving it there because I'm
not sure where it should go (Mail Back End?).
Severity: normal → enhancement
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
OS: Windows 98 → All
Hardware: PC → All
composition -> ducarroz
Assignee: sspitzer → ducarroz
Component: Mail Window Front End → Composition
I would suggest that:

When clicking "Send" on a composition message window, firstly, a copy of the
message is placed on "Unsent Messages". If sending the message fails (for
example the SMTP server is not accesible), an error should show the type of the
problem. If, instead of an error, Netscape crashes, a copy of the message will
remain on Unsent Messages because we have copied it firstly (on Communicator,
this happened to me often). If the user closes the composition message and
doesn't want to save the changes, the mail copy in Unsent Messages should be
deleted. If message is finally sent, the mail copy in Unsent Messages should be
moved to Sent messages.

Any comment?
QA Contact: esther → sheelar
Summary: Send messages go into unsent mail folder before being sent. → RFE: Send messages go into unsent mail folder before being sent.
That sounds like an excellent idea.

The original reporter said that he wanted the mail compose window to go away as
soon as he clicks Send. Bug 86393 is related to this (it deals with removing the
Sending message progress window and placing the sending status in the
composition window).
*** Bug 93677 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Target Milestone: --- → Future
adding self to cc list
QA Contact: sheelar → stephend
Somebody please mod this RFE up!

I've been burned badly by the current behavior: SEND fails(*), leaving my
message in 'Unsent messages', but never actually gets sent until I happen to
toggle offline->online and see the notification that there are unsent messages.
 This has resulted in messages being sent many days late, with no indication of
a problem.

(*) Not sure why I didn't see the dialogs; possibly I forgot to send the message
and then shut down the system.
*** Bug 217125 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is similar to bug 126140, where mscott said "We used to hide the compose
window and everyone hated it so we moved back to 4.x behavior and show you the
compose window with the progress in front of it." and wontfix'ed the bug. I'm in
favor of reopening the issue, though.

Whatever is done, though, let's not close the composition window before the
message is saved somewhere (probably unsent messages)!
I had some thoughts on the UI issues with this bug in bug 217125. You may find
something there you can use here.
Product: MailNews → Core
*** Bug 306225 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I too have been hit by messages staying unnoticed in "unsent" for a long time.  Before T'bird I've used Outlook, Outlook express, and classical AOL.  One or more of these operated the way Gareth King is requesting, and it was intuitive and effective, and I miss it.  

Also, based on my conversations at 
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3267883#3267883
the current "unsent" folder should probably be split into an "outbox" where messages are actively being sent, and a "send error" folder to which outbox messages are moved if they are determined to be in fact in error. Such a move should produce an notification, of course. 
I've just opened bug 420014 which is related to this one but I think significantly different.  It deals with the case where sending email often fails for bad-network reasons and should therefore be retried continuously in the background -- and wouldn't necessarily have to involve asynchronous sending at all.
Sorry, what I meant there is that although I've suggested doing it in the background it could alternatively be done in the foreground if other people find that preferable -- the important thing is that sending the email be continuously retried without more than one user intervention.
Assignee: ducarroz → nobody
Status: ASSIGNED → NEW
QA Contact: stephend → composition
Product: Core → MailNews Core
I too would like to request asynchronous sending to be implemented in Thunderbird.
I currently use Thunderbird 3.0b1pre in combination with Gmail over imap.
Sending even small messages takes too long in my opinion and it can be made so much more efficient if the sending is done in the background.

See also my report here:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=814135&p=4267405#p4267405


Summary: RFE: Send messages go into unsent mail folder before being sent. → Send messages go into unsent mail folder before being sent
Target Milestone: Future → ---
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 15 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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