I initially reported this bug on the main Thunderbird bugzilla website, but it appears to be only happening in the PortableApps version. version 2.0.0.23 (20090812) I do not see a bugzilla website for PortableApps so guess I will report this to this forum and hope someone will act on it... Bugzilla@Mozilla – Bug 524747
What I reported was this -
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14)
Gecko/2009090900 SUSE/3.0.14-0.1 Firefox/3.0.14
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.23 (20090812)
Sometimes, after I have read an email I will click on the Delete button to
remove it. Thunderbird wrongly interprets this and asks me if I am sure I want
to delete the containing folder instead.
Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:
1.I am not sure how to reproduce this exactly but I suspect it happens most of
the time right after I open a new folder and select an email to read. Upon
trying to delete that email, I get asked if I want to delete the entire folder
instead.
2.
3.
Expected Results:
Thunderbird should not assume that the user wants to delete the entire folder
if an email has just been opened and read and the user clicks on the main
Delete button. Probably a better design for deleting folders would be to only
make it part of a right click context sensitive menu instead. (It already is,
but my emphasis is that should be the only way to delete a folder.)
------
There is some follow-on discussion, but the conclusion that we came to is that this problem seems to be related to the PortableApps version of Thunderbird and not the main version.
Marc..
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
What do you mean by "select an email to read."?
If I open my local Thunderbird, click on a folder then the first email in this folder opens in the lower part of Thunderbird. If I then hit the delete button, the folder is still marked and ergo it asks to delete the folder.
Is that what you did?
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
What Simeon said.
It's whatever the active selection is. If the last thing you clicked was the folder and that's what is highlighted (in blue in my theme), then that's what it thinks you want to delete. When you click a folder, it will open the last email you had open in that folder in the preview pane. But what is selected is still the folder. If you last selected an email in the folder, then that is highlighted and that's what it thinks you want to delete.
Thunderbird and Thunderbird Portable both work like this.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
This is the same in the local version. Whatever is actively highlighted, even if you just read an email, is what will be deleted. If you last clicked on a folder and just read the email that was displayed and try and delete, it'll ask about the folder instead of the email.
Guys, thanks for your replies, but please reread my bug report carefully. I am arguing that there are two problems, one is an actual bug, I believe, and the other is a design flaw.
1st.. This problem only sometimes happens, I am opening a folder, THEN I SELECT AN EMAIL to read. This means I actively clicked on an email and therefore it is the last thing that I selected. THEN when I click on Delete I SOMETIMES get asked if I really want to delete the folder instead. This does not happen consistently, only sometimes, but each time it happens I know I had selected and email, not just read the one that was selected by default. How do I KNOW this, you may ask? Because I always select a NEW email that I have not yet read and I am pretty consistent about selecting the first NEW email in a list of them with the intention of working my way down the list in a time/sender ordered fashion. I cannot replicate this problem in a local version of Thunderbird, only in the PortableApps version. (Also I can also say that I am running PortableApps under Wine in Linux, so perhaps there is something happening within this environment that makes it unique to Linux?...)
2nd... I am arguing also, that this could be better designed and the Delete button should never apply to a folder. Instead a folder should only be deleted via a context sensitive menu accessed by right clicking on the folder the user wishes to have deleted. Trying to use a button for two different purposes is somewhat confusing since there is no upfront strong indication as to what the button will affect. You only find out after you clicked on the Delete button what it is going to be applied to. (I don't know how closely the PortableApps Thunderbird developers are connected with the main Thunderbird developers, and perhaps this request for a design change should be sent to them...)
Marc..
Unfortunately, once the people over at the main Tunderbird forum reach the end of their patience (as in non-reproducable issues), they tend to say "go bother those portable people since you are using their portable version."
Rightly or wrongly, it becomes their best excuse.
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
There is a possibility that you are selecting an email *before* the folder has finished loading, in which case it will lose focus. This is more likely to occur on a flash drive as they are MUCH slower than hard drives as they write out emails that are coming in. Pay attention to where the selection is. Even if you clicked on an email, be sure focus didn't return to the folder as it loaded.
As to #2, I think this won't change. I've been using Thunderbird since before 1.0 and it's always been like that. It's never bugged me. You can file a bug, but I'd wager that it will not be changed. It already prompts on deleting the folder vs the email message.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
few days ago, I was also surprised when deleting a mail , it was active , selected etc, but found the whole folder jumping to the trash subsequently.
Put the folder back, selected the mail again, delete, and folder jumps to trash again. Unlucky on my side, I was not asked what I want do, it was just done for me.
Few attempts, still all same, closed TB, opened again and all works fine again.
However, the idea of speed is not bad, the particular mail was rather big, number of Mb, big attachment etc.
I will observe this again more closely next time and report.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
I just encountered a similar bug in my local Thunderbird install today. It showed multiple selections as selected, one of them stuck. I couldn't un-stick it. When I restarted Thunderbird, I couldn't reproduce the problem. So, perhaps there are some bugs in TB with selection. I just hadn't seen them in a very long time before today.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Here is an interesting variant on the problem... I opened a folder and noticed that most of the email is spam and one is somewhat interesting. I clicked on the one that is interesting, read it, then I started to junk the spam by clicking on the garbage can column. I junked several spam emails this way, and when the selected email got back to the one I had just read, I clicked on delete. And was asked if I wanted to delete the entire folder instead!.....
I will submit my request for having a separate method to delete folders, as a bug report, with little hope of seeing it get fixed properly... sigh..
Marc..
I think this demonstrates that something is wrong with the select mechanism and clearly demonstrates something is wrong...
This time I selected an email in a folder knowing it was the end of a range of emails I wanted to mark as spam. Then I selected the other end with a control-A, so this is two clicks to select things within the folder. Then I clicked on Delete and was asked if I wanted to delete the entire folder instead!
Marc...