Nightly feedback

[Gervase Markham]

In the weekly meeting, Dan asked for feedback from people who hadn't
been using nightlies recently. Here it is. I am happy to make the effort
to turn any of this stuff into bugs if people feel that's what it should
be (and I think there's probably at least one here).

So I ran the nightly for the first time, and had an "OMGoodness!
Change!" moment when I was confronted with an inbox which mixed my work
and personal email into one.

Now, I'm sure there are people for whom having multiple email accounts
is an artifact of history, and they would like nothing more than a
unified interface to it. But I keep work and personal email separate on
purpose, and therefore was very keen on the previous Thunderbird
presentation which had them entirely in two separate parts of the folder
tree. Moving (rather than copying) both my inboxes up to the top, and
putting them underneath some kind of Frankenstein inbox, feels (for my
usage patterns) like a backwards step.

In fact, on closer inspection it seems that the entire tree has been
turned inside out, to group folders by type (Sent, Junk) rather than by
account. :-( Except that the inside-out feel isn't complete because the
folders for each account still exist, containing the detritus of what's
left after the important ones have moved elsewhere - my "reference"
folder for important mail, and my "todo" folder, for example. So now the
set of folders for a particular account are spread across the whole tree.

Along with those two inboxes is the Local Folders inbox, which doesn't
actually ever have any messages coming into it, so sits there like a
fifth wheel. Can we detect if no accounts are using it, and suppress
that one?

Then I discovered a serious dataloss bug. Each account has a folder
called "archive" (note lower case and no S) which, for a long time now,
I've been using to store all my archived mail. When the new Thunderbird
archive feature came along, it used "Archives" (capital A, with an S). I
continued to use Nostalgy to save mail to the original one, because I
didn't like the year/month behaviour of the Thunderbird system. I set
the two "archive" folders to be the message archive folder in server
settings, to try and reduce the number of misfiled messages. (However,
for some reason, I could never delete the "Archives" ones.)

However, now I've installed a nightly, those "archive" folders are both
invisible in the folder tree. I can see the "Archives" folders, with a
few stray messages in, under the Archives top-level folder. But my
"archive" folders, and all their messages, are nowhere to be found! They
are not back in the "all the other folders" part of the tree.

Search Everywhere, at first glance, rocks my socks. However, I can see
it down the bottom, beavering away to index my mail folders back to
1999. When it's finished, I can see search quality taking a nosedive.
It's fairly unlikely that a normal search would want to include those.
How can I keep them available in my mail client without having them
clutter up my search results?

I hope that's useful. Due to it hiding 95% of my mail, I've had to
switch back to an earlier build for now. I assume this is a bug I should
file?

Gerv

[David Ascher]

On 9/14/09 11:56 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> I hope that's useful. Due to it hiding 95% of my mail, I've had to
> switch back to an earlier build for now. I assume this is a bug I
> should file?

Nope, you can just change from the 'smart folders' view to the "all
folders view" and restore your world order.

--david

[Andrew Sutherland]

On 09/14/2009 11:56 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Search Everywhere, at first glance, rocks my socks. However, I can see
> it down the bottom, beavering away to index my mail folders back to
> 1999. When it's finished, I can see search quality taking a nosedive.
> It's fairly unlikely that a normal search would want to include those.
> How can I keep them available in my mail client without having them
> clutter up my search results?

When you say search quality, you aren't talking about performance, right?

Have you tried using the timeline to filter the results to a more recent
time period? That will cause the other constraints to update too, which
is nice. Our time-selection has some quantization limitations right
now, but it should be usable. Ideally we will support selecting a range
of time at some point soon if we can figure out how to make the UI
obvious and easy to use.

Andrew

[Gervase Markham]

But surely both views are supposed to have all of the same folders, but
in a different order? If folders do not appear at all in one of the two
views, that's dataloss as far as a user is concerned, if they don't know
how to switch views.

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 14/09/09 20:32, Andrew Sutherland wrote:
> On 09/14/2009 11:56 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>> Search Everywhere, at first glance, rocks my socks. However, I can see
>> it down the bottom, beavering away to index my mail folders back to
>> 1999. When it's finished, I can see search quality taking a nosedive.
>> It's fairly unlikely that a normal search would want to include those.
>> How can I keep them available in my mail client without having them
>> clutter up my search results?
>
> When you say search quality, you aren't talking about performance, right?

No, not performance. I was referring to irrelevant matches from ten
years ago.

> Have you tried using the timeline to filter the results to a more recent
> time period? That will cause the other constraints to update too, which
> is nice. Our time-selection has some quantization limitations right now,
> but it should be usable. Ideally we will support selecting a range of
> time at some point soon if we can figure out how to make the UI obvious
> and easy to use.

I confess I didn't investigate deeply. I will do so. If it's possible to
set a "default range of time" (say, the last year), that would be excellent.

Gerv

[Marcel Kneuer]

Yes and I think that is a big reason, while it is good to have the smart
folder view, but not to have it as the first view that comes to the
users when they uprade from tb2 to tb3.

Marcel

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[David Ascher]

Did you look for the old "archive" folder under the per-account folder
trees?

[David Bienvenu]

On 9/14/2009 12:47 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>
> But surely both views are supposed to have all of the same folders, but
> in a different order? If folders do not appear at all in one of the two
> views, that's dataloss as far as a user is concerned, if they don't know
> how to switch views.

yes, they're supposed to show the same set of folders, but it's
different code building up the view, so there might be bugs.

When you switched Archives folders around, you may have got your profile
into a state that somehow confuses the code that builds up the folder
pane. Do you see any errors on the console? When you go back to all
folders mode, do you see multiple folders in the account with the
archive icon?

- David

[Gervase Markham]

On 14/09/09 21:18, David Ascher wrote:
> Did you look for the old "archive" folder under the per-account folder
> trees?

Yes, and didn't find it. :-(

Gerv

[Gervase Markham]

On 14/09/09 21:57, David Bienvenu wrote:
> When you switched Archives folders around, you may have got your profile
> into a state that somehow confuses the code that builds up the folder
> pane. Do you see any errors on the console? When you go back to all
> folders mode, do you see multiple folders in the account with the
> archive icon?

That's nailed it. Yes, yes I do. In my personal account only, I have two
folders with the special "sent" icon - "Sent" and my actual "sent-mail"
(a leftover from Pine!). In both accounts, I have two with the "archive"
icon - "archive" and "Archives".

Here's my error console from starting the most recent build, although I
don't think there's anything helpful:

Failed to load XPCOM component:
/home/gerv/.thunderbird/lbzrpsx3.gerv/extensions/{8845e3b3-e8fb-40e2-95e9-ec40294818c4}/components/wzIQuicktext.idl

2009-09-14 22:23:16 gloda.datastore WARN Global database has been purged
due to schema change.

Do let me know what else I can provide, or whether you want to take this
to a bug.

Gerv

[David Ascher]

If you can file a bug w/ STRs and details of your accounts, it'd be
super helpful.

--david

[David Bienvenu]

On 9/14/2009 2:25 PM, Gervase Markham wrote:

> Do let me know what else I can provide, or whether you want to take this
> to a bug.

Let's take it to a bug, thanks! Can you file a bug on me, with STR as
best you can remember? What I would expect to see is two sub-folders of
the top-level smart archives folder with the account name of the account
where you have duplicate archives folders. Er, what I would really
expect is not to end up with two folders with the archive flag set, but
we should still handle it.

- David

[Clint Talbert]

On 9/14/09 12:32 PM, Andrew Sutherland wrote:
>
> Have you tried using the timeline to filter the results to a more recent
> time period? That will cause the other constraints to update too, which
> is nice. Our time-selection has some quantization limitations right now,
> but it should be usable. Ideally we will support selecting a range of
> time at some point soon if we can figure out how to make the UI obvious
> and easy to use.

A range query would be awesome, but notwithstanding that, I was asking
Dmose a question about the search view today and he had to tell me that
I could click on the timeline. I had no idea. I immediately then saw
that on mouseover the bars change colors, but the first few times I
looked at this last week when it landed, I never saw that and had
absolutely no idea you could click on it to help narrow the search.

Clint

[Gervase Markham]

On 14/09/09 23:21, David Bienvenu wrote:
> Let's take it to a bug, thanks! Can you file a bug on me, with STR as
> best you can remember?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516923

Gerv