User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.16) Gecko/20110319 Firefox/3.6.16 Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Thunderbird/3.1.9 When viewing one message in the preview pane, and using right-click to tag a second message, the first message also gets the tag in the preview pane. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Using the 3-pane (folders, list, and preview), select a message (message A) so that it appears in the preview pane. 2. Right-click a different message (message B) in the list view. 3. On the context menu, select Tag -- Important (or any tag, doesn't matter). Actual Results: Observe that message B in the list view immediately appears with the colored text. But in the preview pane, the current message A receives the colored tag you just added to the other message. Expected Results: Message B should receive the tag. Message A should not been affected. The tag appears to be temporary. If you click on Message B in the list view so that it appears in the preview pane, it has the correct tags. Returning to Message A reveals that it does not have the incorrect tag.

Outch!!! - Confirming exactly as described in comment 0. Thanks Matthew for reporting. This bogus focus issue has worried me for a long time. If we could just adhere to the ux-principle of "focus follows mouse" (for both right- and left-click), such nonsense behaviour would never happen. It's probably by design ("sticky selection when right-click"), but it's so irritating, and afasik completely ux-inconsistent with OS or any other app out there. We're not even updating the preview for that temporary right-click selection of single messages which preserves multiple selection in the background. I wonder how this behaves for other commands - the UX of this really confusing. This might be dupe of that other bug which hopefully exists for "right-click in message list does not move focus".