Matt H Reporter
	Description • 15 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090327 Fedora/3.1-0.11.beta3.fc11 Firefox/3.1b3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090324 Fedora/3.0-2.1.beta2.fc11 Thunderbird/3.0b2

If Thunderbird is unable to check an email account (commonly, because the computer is not connected to the internet) it pop-ups a series of intrusive and unhelpful alerts. Instead, Thunderbird should inform the user non-intrusively, and help the user diagnose the problem.

[The usability improvement would be similar to Firefox replacing the 'server not found' alert with the "Address Not Found" page.]

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Disconnect your computer from the internet
2. Tell Thunderbird to check your email - click 'get mail', open Thunderbird, or wait 5 minutes
Actual Results:  
For each account in Thunderbird, the user gets a pop up alert 'Alert' telling them Thunderbird could not connect to a server, 'the connection was refused'. 

Expected Results:  
Thunderbird should inform the user non-intrusively it could not check their email (giving the account name). The user could then choose to read a fuller message, which would give details (the server address), and help the user diagnose or dismiss the problem. It should encourage the user to check that their computer is connected to the internet, and indicate the possibility that their mail server is temporarily down. If the user has recently changed their mail settings  (Thunderbird could test for this), it could ask the user to check their settings.

The message would expand if their were errors for more than one server, not greatly suspect.

Perhaps the error could be in a Firefox's 'remember this password'-like message, that when clicked opened the detailed message and diagnosis page in a new tab.

Similarly, password errors etc could be handled this way.