Thunderbird:Activity Manager

Currently the status bar acts as one of the only notification systems to the user. However the status bar is a steady stream of temporal plain text messages. The messages are helpful if you understand what they are indicating, otherwise to most people they only convey general activity happening. In general the messages end up lacking meaning because there is too much information running by.

Relevant Bugs

• bug 123440 — Stop that annoying modal dialog when mail can't connect to the mail server from connection time out error
• bug 253426 — display activity in status bar

Rich Status Bar

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| (8) Online                                                    |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| (3) Offline                                                   |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| (8) Online  |  {v} Downloading (3) New Messages               |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| (8) Online  |  {>} Moving _Road Trip_ to _Archives_           |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

Activity Manager

Many pieces borrowed from the design and implementations of the Download Manager. Essentially providing a journal of the download and user activity that Thunderbird processes.

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                           | ^ |
|                                                           +---|
|-----------------------------------------------------------|   |
|                                                           |   |
|                                                           |   |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|   |
|                                                           |   |
|                                                           |   |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|   |
|                                                           |   |
|                                                           |   |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|   |
|                                                           +---|
|                                                           | v |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+---+
| [ Clear List ]                             [_Search...______] |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Synchronize _GMail_ messages                          10:30am |
| [=================================================    ]   (x) |
| 1 minute remaining -- 146 of 148 _new messages_               |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Synchronize _GMail_ messages                        yesterday |
| Canceled                                                  (&) |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Sent message _Road Trip Plans_                        10:30am |
| to:joe@example.com, 1 attachment                              |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Moving _Road Trip Plans_ to _Archives_                10:32am |
| to:joe@example.com, 1 attachment                              |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+

Much of this taken from the blog post Activity is the new Download