For the past few months I’ve been following Thunderbird Bug 227305: Support drag-drop messages to desktop / file-system window (e.g. Explorer). Unlike MS Outlook, Thunderbird currently does not allow you to save an email message by dragging it to your desktop. Not quite sure of the circumstances as to how I became aware of and started tracking this bug, likely a contact-us or a forum posting. This bug was filed back in December 2003 with Thunderbird 0.1 and for the most part over the past 5-years has laid dormant. There have been occasional comments/votes in BugZilla but not much else.
Since I voted for the bug a while back I’ve been getting update emails anytime the status changes. For the most part I would get an email once or twice a month if someone has made a comment on the bug. However in the last week I suddenly started getting multiple emails a day. On March 10th, comment #39 was added: “This is an assigned student-project from NUS for CS3108 08/09 Semester 2.” So far it appears in the last day or so there is a preliminary patch that is being tested with some luck on Linux but not so much with Windows.
This is a great example of the benefits of Thunderbird being an open-source application as well as what can be done within the open-source community. Given this has been open for the past 5-years, this bug must be a low priority issue to the Thunderbird developers. But now some Thunderbird users has taken the initiative to get this feature in place.
