Serious fault with new compose interface

[Grhm]

Do not trust the new compose interface!

I just raised this ticket:

Your webmail interface just sent a mail to several people whom I hadn't included in any of the to, cc or bcc fields of the mail. This is extremely embarrassing, but if the content had been more sensitive it would have been disastrous.

You have recently made some major changes to the way addresses are entered into the to/cc/bcc fields when composing a message. I have a great number of issues with this, which I had intended to contact you about in due course, but this ticket has been precipitated by a fault which caused the interface to send mails to a bunch of addresses I had expressly chosen not to include.

I habitually compile the list of addressees to which I wish to send an e-mail by selecting one or more groups and then deleting those individual addresses to which I do NOT wish to send the mail.

This used to be a simple matter of selecting them as if they were text, and deleting them. One could also cut and paste any number of addresses out of one field into another field, or into the body of the mail, or indeed anywhere.

With the new arrangement the addresses no longer appear like text, but each one appears in a little separate box which cannot be edited. Not only is it no longer possible to select several addresses at once, it no longer seems to be possible to select, cut, copy or delete even one individual address. Instead, one has to select each in turn and then activate the new little context menu (if it appears, which it often doesn't) and choose 'remove' from that. This is horribly fiddly and time consuming even with a relatively short list of recipients. But even after going through all that pain just now, when I sent the e-mail it went to ALL the addresses in ALL the groups that I had selected initially, including all the addresses I had laboriously deleted one-by-one and which no longer appeared in any of the to/cc/bcc fields.

Even if your new scheme worked as intended it would very significantly less user-friendly than the system it replaced... but it doesn't even work as intended!

Please reverse these ill-thought-through, badly implemented, and as far as I can see utterly pointless changes.

I also think an apology is in order.

[Bamb0]

Its sad.. They have something GOOD and then ruin it and think its better!


Very sad.......

[hadaso]

I tried to recreate this using a group of my own addresses and then deleting all but one and sending and I got only one copy (and no bounces to nonexistent or blocked addresses).


I sometimes need to erase several recipients from email when I reply to some but not all of the addresses in a message I reply to. Usually it's not many addresses to delete but if there are many it would be more convenient to be able to mark multiple addresses (a range of addresses) to delete from the list of recipients.
It is sometimes also desirable to be able to manually rearrange the list of recipients.


One useful action I would welcome in the Compose screen is the ability to revert from "reply" to :reply all" from the compose screen, without having to abandon the half composed message. Often I realize I needed to "reply all (or some) only after I compose part of the reply.

[Grhm]

Interesting that you couldn't reproduce the error, hadaso. But I promise that it happened exactly as I described. I was using the mobile interface on a Firefox-based browser on an Android phone.

I've now received a rather flippant and dismissive reply, closing the ticket. Apparently I need to "adjust" to the new interface. And the fault wasn't a fault, because if I'd spotted it within 15 seconds [which I didn't] I could have done an 'undo-send'.

Well, that's OK then!

I've re-opened the ticket and repeated the statement:

The webmail sent a mail to several people whom I hadn't included in any of the to, cc or bcc fields of the mail.

I have asked the drudge to read that sentence twice and to escalate the ticket to appropriate colleagues.

I'll keep you informed.

[JeremyNicoll]

Originally Posted by Grhm

I've now received a rather flippant and dismissive reply, closing the ticket. Apparently I need to "adjust" to the new interface. And the fault wasn't a fault, because if I'd spotted it within 15 seconds [which I didn't] I could have done an 'undo-send'.

Well, that's OK then!

That's deeply worrying. Support staff who don't understand the import of what you tell them are a menace.

I hope this was solely down to an inept person rather than (as one often sees elsewhere) an inappropriate answer picked by some automated process which poorly chooses rote answers in response to certain words in one's ticket text.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by hadaso

...it would be more convenient to be able to mark multiple addresses (a range of addresses) to delete from the list of recipients.
It is sometimes also desirable to be able to manually rearrange the list of recipients.

I now fiddled with it a bit more, and I found out that I can select multiple addresses in any of the To, Cc or Bcc fields using the keyboard (shift + right or left arrow). Then I can cut and paste using the keyboard (ctrl + x or v) and I can also drag the selected addresses between the To, Cc and Bcc fields, or drag them to rearrange them within the field.
I haven't discovered how to select multiple addresses with the mouse yet. Perhaps it is possible.


I only tried this on the desktop app on a PC (in Firefox). I hardly use the mobile app for composing because it lacks an essential element in the toolbar that the webmail app has, and that is the RTL/LTR toolbar buttons. I cannot compose messages in Hebrew using the mobile client because it doesn't have the buttons to set the direction from right to left (the other toolbar buttons are available in the mobile app). Frankly the only thing I need is a control that would allow editing the html source of the message which I sometimes do in the webmail client (using browser based debugging tools).

[Grhm]

Update:
I have been unable to to trigger the fault reliably, but it happened again once last night when I was experimenting using the desktop web interface on a Firefox-based browser on my Linux laptop.
Until I hear back from them that they have identified the cause and fixed it, I am being very cautious about how I compose e-mails, and I recommend everyone else to do the same.

Hadaso:
They tell me that with the new interface "you can use ⌘ + Click to select individual recipients, or ⇧ + Click to select a range of recipients".
Of course that presupposes you have a physical keyboard, so it doesn't help with the mobile interface.
And in any case, until this alarming fault has been definitively fixed I don't recommend you use this method.

[Grhm]

Further update:
The support person clearly has no conception of how serious this fault is, and has closed the ticket for a second time, with another infuriatingly offhand and flippant comment.
But I have reproduced the fault now on both the mobile and desktop versions of the webmail interface, and have captured the behaviour on video.
I have re-opened the ticket and asked them to watch the video.
Perhaps when they see it they might start to take me seriously.
Perhaps.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by Grhm

...
They tell me that with the new interface "you can use ⌘ + Click to select individual recipients, or ⇧ + Click to select a range of recipients"....

Doesn't work for me (Firefox 148 on Windows 11, asumming ⌘ means ctrl and ⇧ means shift). Also selecting multiple addresses with the keyboard that worked 3 days ago is not working now.

[hadaso]

Originally Posted by hadaso

Doesn't work for me (Firefox 148 on Windows 11, asumming ⌘ means ctrl and ⇧ means shift). Also selecting multiple addresses with the keyboard that worked 3 days ago is not working now.

And now, a few minutes later, on the same window that I have not touched for a few minutes, it works. Seems a bit unstable.

[Grhm]

The response to my submitting the videos:

I've relayed all of this information within the internal task with our development team so they will be able to carefully review why this may be happening.

I wonder what "within the internal task" means. But it seems the support person has at last deigned to pass the info to someone else in the organization, which is progress, I suppose, of sorts. Perhaps.

Originally Posted by hadaso

assuming ⌘ means ctrl and ⇧ means shift

I had to ask what the ⌘ symbol meant, and the reply was "I believe the key equivalent on a Windows computer would be the Windows button!" [the exclamation mark is in the original] Maybe it's a Google thing?
Anyhow, although pretty much every other application ever written uses Ctrl for that, for some inscrutable reason they have chosen to go their own way in this particular context.

[n5bb]

Originally Posted by Grhm

The response to my submitting the videos:

I wonder what "within the internal task" means. But it seems the support person has at last deigned to pass the info to someone else in the organization, which is progress, I suppose, of sorts. Perhaps.


I had to ask what the ⌘ symbol meant, and the reply was "I believe the key equivalent on a Windows computer would be the Windows button!" [the exclamation mark is in the original] Maybe it's a Google thing?
Anyhow, although pretty much every other application ever written uses Ctrl for that, for some inscrutable reason they have chosen to go their own way in this particular context.

The ⌘ key (also known as Command) is found on Apple keyboards. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key

I have that key on the keyboard I use with my iPad. It usually replaces the CTRL key found on Windows computers. So I cut and paste on the iPad external keyboard using ⌘-C to copy, then ⌘-V to paste.

The Windows key looks like the Windows logo. It?s a stylized version of four adjacent rectangles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_key

[Grhm]

Update - I've received this:

Thanks for reporting this, and sorry for any trouble caused. We have tracked down the cause of this issue and rolled out a fix. To reproduce you had to:
Create an email
Save a draft
Remove some recipients without making any other changes to the email.
Send the email within 3 minutes of the draft being saved.
This was a fairly unusual editing pattern, which is why it was not picked up earlier. We appreciate your detailed report to help us squash this bug.

It has always been the case that once you get the attention of someone competent at Fastmail, they will act quickly and sensibly; but it is becoming harder and harder to get past their praetorian guard of vacuous 'support' staff.

I find this whole episode very worrying, not just because of the support failings, but more importantly because of the nature of the fault.
I'm not a software engineer, but surely one wouldn't expect something so basic to be 'picked up' in testing, still less after the system has gone live? It suggests to me a major flaw in the underlying logic of the system.

I will continue to exercise great caution when composing e-mails using the new webmail interface, and advise others to do the same.