939405 - Scrolling down too far in preview pane selects first unread message

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Kenney]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131025151332

Steps to reproduce:

Open a recent message of more than one page in the 3-view layout, in a folder containing unread messages.
Click on the message preview pane.
Press space repeatedly until another message is selected.




Actual results:

The first unread message in the mailbox (several thousand emails prior) is selected, which makes me have to scroll the message list down all the way and find the message again, all because I pressed space once too often.


Expected results:

Message scrolls down until it reaches the end; pressing space once it does, does nothing.

Rationale: scrolling down inside a message using a common key (space) (browsers for instance use the same) should not switch to a higher level context.
I understand that the space key is not simply 'page down' but is used to advance to the next unread message across folders. However, the context in which it is meaningful is the folder and message lists. Focusing the message pane window by explicitly clicking on it should change the context for operations to a single message.

Proposed solution 1: change the function of the space key to default to page down if the message pane is selected, and retain old behaviour if the folder or message lists are selected/focused.

Proposed solution 2: add a configuration option / allow easy key mapping.

Proposed solution 3: let the backspace key return to the previously viewed message.

Note: I understand this might be nit-picking; I could as well just retrain myself to use the page-down key, however, I wanted to merely offer this feedback so that it can be taken into consideration for future improvements.

Thank you for reading!

Comment 1

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Solution 3 already exists: hit the "[" key to return to the previously-selected message.

Comment 2

[Kenney]

Awesome, thank you!

issue can be closed as far as I am concerned, though having the keybindings listed somewhere in the application would definitely be an improvement.