Comment 66 for bug 885525

I found this bug recently after discovering that I have been losing emails I had not intended to lose for an indeterminate period of time. I am deeply angry, and I believe rightly so.

I have a gmail account. I'm using Thunderbird 31.6.0 on Ubuntu linux. The thunderbird UI clearly states, under Account Settings / Server Settings:

"When I delete a message:"

and gives three options, one of which is:

"Move it to this folder: " with a selection box.

I selected [Gmail] -> All Mail. Instead, when I push delete, the message is not moved to that folder, but is moved to the [Gmail] -> Trash folder.

Why, in the name of all that is decent and human, is that UI option not simply removed, or greyed out, or annoted with a "this doesn't always work" message, or SOMETHING, INSTEAD OF BEING SILENTLY IGNORED? The thunderbird UI is lying to me, and I lost data because of it.

I really like thunderbird. I love that it gives me a really nice way to use OpenPGP. I love that it is open source. I love that it is clean an functional.

I understand (now) that I can just push 'a' instead of <Delete>, and use the archive function. If it was just a matter of having to use a different keyboard shortcut, that would be fine.

I understand (now) that it is a little complicated to fix this due to Google changing the text label of the All Mail folder under certain conditions. I only mostly followed the technical details given by WADA and others over the course of this thread. Maybe I've gotten some detail of that statement wrong. It doesn't really matter. Ignoring the option is not the problem. Special cases for gmail are not the problem. The problem is that the UI said it would do one thing and in fact did another, causing me to lose data.

This bug, it seems to me, highlights a deeper problem. The problem is not that the code hasn't been refactored to either gray out that option or make it do what it says. I understand that this is difficult and time consuming for developers, and that there are other priorities, and that this is a somewhat obscure option. The problem is that nobody seems to have thought about this problem from the perspective of the user. Even a static text message above that option would be preferable to what we have now. It could say something like:

"Note: this setting is ignored in some cases. See <link>."

Heck, even without a link to more explanation it would be preferable to what we have now.