delete thunderbird archives folder 15. Dec 2009
I just upgraded to Thunderbird 3. Things seem to be a little speedier now, which feels quite nice. The only pitfall i experienced was the new archive feature. I tried it out, just to see what happens. Just for the record, I am using the IMAP protocol for managing my mails. So I selected a mail and pressed a to archive it. Thunderbird created an Archives folder with a subfolder named after the year of the mail. Okay, I thought, this is nice but not so exciting since I don’t want to decide on every mail if I want to keep it or not. So I thought I’d delete the Archives folder and just ignore the feature. Since I was too lazy to reach my keyboard I wanted to do it via the context menu. On every regular folder you have an option in the context menu to delete it (see screenshot). Unfortunately this menu item is missing in the context menu of the Archives folder. Most likely because the Thunderbird developers fear that the average joe might unintentionally delete all the mails in his precious archive. Okay, here are the good news. They weren’t consequent. After about a half an hour of unnecessary fiddling around I found a convingly simple solution. If you reach for you keyboard you can simply press backspace or delete and Thunderbird will ask you to verify the deletion of Archives. Boohay! After deletion, the folder stays gone as long as you don’t use the archive function. I hope they don’t fix this “bug”, meaning I hope they don’t remove the ability to delete the Archives folder via keyboard. By the way, is there any common word in english or german for property of a program which the developer sees as a bug, but the user as a feature? I mean there certainly must be a word for the opposite, meaning an official feature which feels more like a bug to the user, but I don’t remember it.
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Loopkid: excellent analysis!
Thanks a lot for documenting this! Wonderful, I was getting very annoyed by not being able to get rid of Archives. Indeed, hope they don’t “fix” this bug…
Thanks! I just ran into that as well. I hate when software tries to protect you by not allowing certain actions - maybe one extra confirmation dialog would be just sufficient.
In information system we’re developing we do have “serious confirm” dialog for sensitive actions. This dialog can not be confirmed just by pressing Enter (or clicking OK) but you have to type in “Yes” in order to confirm the action (“Yes” is localized, of course). This seems to work fine for our users.
As far as I think, the deletion of an archive-folder with the “delete” key is a serious problem they didn’t thought about. It should not be possible, as well as it is not possible to delete the inbox, outbox or junk folder, because they are all special folders. Of course, because it is not a mandatory folder, there should be an option to inactivate archiving instead. It should throw a warning, that all archived messages will be lost.
The problem: Once you delete your archive folder this way, the archive option is corrupted. Archive another message and you see what I mean: The newly created “Archive” folder just acts and looks like a normal folder, does not create the yearly subfolders and the archived message seems to be lost forever, unless you reverse your last action immediately.