bug: archiving with 'y' does not work after deleting attachements
 

There is an annoying bug where archiving a message and navigating to next message does not work if you delete attachments.

Steps to reproduce:
1. open a message
2. select the attachement
3. Click "delete from message"
4. Press "y" to archive the message.
5. Press "j" to go to next message

Result:
- same message is shown, even after multiple times pressing "j"

Expected result:
- next message is shown

Workaround:
- go back to message list 'e.g. with "u" and then archiving and navigation works fine again

I have a customer with a similar problem (almost certainly related under the covers).. After deleting attachment(s) , moving a message to another folder needs to be retried two or three times before it takes effect. This seriously impacts his workflow.

This is a problem because deleting attachments gives the message a new ID (it has to, we're physically rewriting the message, and IMAP UIDs always map to an immutable message)

Deleting attachments is a feature we offered to help people manage their mailbox with small quotas. None of our current plans have small quotas, so optimising for this case isn't a priority.

Regards,

Bron.

Thank you for the feedback. I guessed the problem was something of this nature. What puzzles me a bit is that the problem used not to exist. Is there no way of forcing the message to be immediately reloaded when the message id changes?

While 15 GB (legacy enhanced subscription) or 25 GB might seem a lot, if you are receiving 100-200 emails per day and want to keep a full history, the mailbox fills up pretty quickly unless getting rid of large attachments. This probably impacts relatively few users, but I have two customers who are badly affected. Moving messages before deleting the attachments works, but there is no way doing the move, deleting the attachment(s) and then being back into (usually) an Inbox to continue working.

I was waiting to see if the problem was going to be fixed. On the assumption that it will now not be, I am going to suggest they modify their workflow. I am unsure how well this will be accepted. My idea is that, rather than delete attachments as they go, they have a saved search that shows all emails with attachments received in the last, perhaps, 7 days that are larger than 500 KB. This would be sorted with most recent messages first. They could then work through the message list, deleting attachments as desired. I think this will be workable, but people hate changing their everyday work methods.

Anyone see a better workaround?

Thanks for the quick feedback.
Indeed, I am using the feature to keep my mailbox under 1GB.
Although I am sorry to hear that it won't be fixed, I do understand feature prioritization is unavoidable, and as a result some things don't make it.

That's as may be but it's still a BUG :mad:

I have noticed this myself, and it's not too disruptive to me to return to message list and then archive, but... c'mon.... a bug is a bug.

Although I agree this is a bug, and I would like to see it fixed, I do understand Brong's point of view. I am sure there are many outstanding bugs, each of them requiring a small, medium or large effort to fix. In combination with the impact of the bug and feature popularity I understand that some bugs don't make it high enough up on the list.
Only in the ideal world do all bugs get fixed...

This bug is trivial to fix, just take away the "remove attachment" feature. It's a weird thing that nobody else really does anyway, modifying the underlying message.

While not an especially common feature, Thunderbird does support deleting of attachments (by creating a copy of the message without the attachment). It is much more convenient doing it within FastMail.

I assume the main difficulty in making it work is the interaction with asynchronous page loading. It only seems to have become an issue in the last year or so. I have one customer in particular who uses this feature constantly, and only started complaining about the problem about six months ago.

If it's a question of losing the remove-attachments feature, I can live with the bug.

Hmm, that's hardly what I would consider a bug fix :)

Apple Mail also allows to delete attachments. The strange thing is, some emails have attachments that can only be deleted in Apple Mail, and others only using the Fastmail web interface.

In my experience, it is one of the commonest "fixes", perhaps only surpassed by a documentation update.

I have known cases where Microsoft "HTML" (with extra HTML parts for certain purposes such as "embedded" images) would be treated differently. Apple Mail has code that recognizes the Microsoft "HTML extensions" and re-embeds the separated parts, while FastMail treats those extra parts like attachments. I cannot recall seeing a case where Apple Mail shows attachments where FasMail does not. I am curious as to when that occurs.