Bug in production web UI: all saved drafts are marked as high priority
 

FastMail yesterday rolled out a new feature from beta to production in the web UI: a dropdown menu on the message compose screen with an option to Mark as High Priority.

Unfortunately this rollout included a bug whereby any message saved as a draft and reopened in the web UI will be marked and sent as high priority. Even if the user notices and unchecks Mark as High Priority, upon closing and reopening the draft, it will be marked as high priority again.

The problem is exacerbated because the dropdown menu options are hidden from the user, meaning that since yesterday, many users have been sending "high priority" messages without their knowing.

This bug affects all browsers and the mobile app, including the mobile web UI where the user cannot access these dropdown options to workaround the bug.

To reproduce:

1. open FastMail web UI
2. click Compose
3. optionally enter address, subject, body text, etc.
4. click Save Now
5. navigate away from message and back
6. click message More dropdown

Expected results:

Message should remain normal priority.

Actual results:

Message is now marked high priority.

Update: this bug now appears fixed in production.

I can just un-tick the high priority

Thanks for providing the solution Terry...

Better report it directly to FastMail support. FM is not coming quite often here.

This is potentially a problem because, in my experience at least, "high priority" is a 99.9% certain "this is spam" flag. Of the messages I have received down the years that were marked as "urgent", one actually was urgent; all the rest were spam. Hence, being flagged as "high priority" is one of the criteria on which a message automatically gets sent to my "suspect" folder.

(I think I may have mentioned this before.)

Looking through the git history it appears this bug was fixed pretty quickly after the feature was first rolled out. It should be fine now.

I just checked and Drafts are still set to "high priority" by default. Can this setting be turned off?

I just saved a message in the Compose screen and opened the draft. "High priority" was not set. I did this several times in three different Fastmail accounts and got the same results. I'm not sure what you are seeing, but if you see it using a simple test (Compose, add a subject, click Save Now, open Draft folder and view the priority state in "More...") then I recommend filing a support request. Maybe only certain accounts are affected.

Bill

I think it was a holdover since I had many Drafts before the switch. The new emails are not getting set to High Priority.