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delete email in expanded thread deletes other emails in thread and not in thread

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  • Last reply by Matt

philkirkley
philkirkley
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Along with most of the world, I hate threads. My normal practice is to keep only the last email in a thread quoting all the contributions, and to delete the rest. Then I have one email with everything about that in it, with a history trail. I've done this for years and years. Then, some time last year, after an update of Thunderbird, everything was in threads. Someone replies to my message, and the thread goes missing from Sent, and appears in Inbox, but not marked as unread - you only see this when you expand the thread. If you reply, it jumps back into Sent. Finding anything is now a time-consuming nightmare. But there also appears to be at least one bug.

Suppose I now go into a thread and delete an intervening email. Thunderbird clears the preview panel of emails. If I click on Sent then back in Inbox, they reappear! But if I'm now confused as to exactly what that delete did to how many emails, I click Edit / Undo Delete. What it seemed to do tonight when I hit the Delete was get rid of a big chunk of the large thread, including some emails I hadn't read yet, and some not in this or other threads! They are not in the Deleted folder - they are gone! I think it has also done this before. What a mess! As for evidence, reproducing it is not something I want to do.

Along with most of the world, I hate threads. My normal practice is to keep only the last email in a thread quoting all the contributions, and to delete the rest. Then I have one email with everything about that in it, with a history trail. I've done this for years and years. Then, some time last year, after an update of Thunderbird, everything was in threads. Someone replies to my message, and the thread goes missing from Sent, and appears in Inbox, but not marked as unread - you only see this when you expand the thread. If you reply, it jumps back into Sent. Finding anything is now a time-consuming nightmare. But there also appears to be at least one bug. Suppose I now go into a thread and delete an intervening email. Thunderbird clears the preview panel of emails. If I click on Sent then back in Inbox, they reappear! But if I'm now confused as to exactly what that delete did to how many emails, I click Edit / Undo Delete. What it seemed to do tonight when I hit the Delete was get rid of a big chunk of the large thread, including some emails I hadn't read yet, and some not in this or other threads! They are not in the Deleted folder - they are gone! I think it has also done this before. What a mess! As for evidence, reproducing it is not something I want to do.

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Matt
Matt
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philkirkley said
Along with most of the world, I hate threads.

Then turn it off. Either the default of on a per folder basis. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-threading-thunderbird#w_changing-default-threading-mode

My normal practice is to keep only the last email in a thread quoting all the contributions, and to delete the rest.

You mean the last email with a million quoted replies that I routinely delete before I type my reply. So I like threads because I recognize that the duplication in the quoted text is a reflection on the laziness or ignorance of the respondent in leaving it there. Different approaches for different folks I guess. You would hate me as a correspondent and I would simply not like getting mail from you.

Then I have one email with everything about that in it, with a history trail.

Only if you don't get the reply from me. It will either be like this one interleaved, or with no quoted text at all as I prune that rubbish routinely.

I've done this for years and years. Then, some time last year, after an update of Thunderbird, everything was in threads.
yes the default was changed, but only for new users and those that created new profiles. I missed the change with my old profile and first really head about it when folk started in the support forums.
Someone replies to my message, and the thread goes missing from Sent, and appears in Inbox, but not marked as unread - you only see this when you expand the thread. If you reply, it jumps back into Sent. Finding anything is now a time-consuming nightmare. But there also appears to be at least one bug.

That does sound like a bug. As threading only works on the current folder. that is inbox messages are threaded, you have to right click and select open in conversation view to bring in messages from other folders.

Suppose I now go into a thread and delete an intervening email. Thunderbird clears the preview panel of emails. If I click on Sent then back in Inbox, they reappear! But if I'm now confused as to exactly what that delete did to how many emails, I click Edit / Undo Delete. What it seemed to do tonight when I hit the Delete was get rid of a big chunk of the large thread, including some emails I hadn't read yet, and some not in this or other threads! They are not in the Deleted folder - they are gone! I think it has also done this before. What a mess! As for evidence, reproducing it is not something I want to do.

Well I can not reproduce it. I can not even get the messages from other folders just appearing in threads, so please I can not support your assertion because I can not manage to make Thunderbird do any of the things you say it is doing.

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