See that? That is the Thunderbird dock icon on Mac OS X. It shows the number of unread emails you have.
What looks like “1487!” is actually “14875” with part of the “5” cut off. I have discovered the dock icon can’t display 5-digit numbers correctly! A bug!
Hm. Perhaps this is the rare case where it is, in fact, the user’s fault for having 14875 unread emails. What should Thunderbird do when you get to five digits? At this point the exact number is not particularly informative. Maybe when you get to 5 digits, it should just show an infinity symbol. Or a sign that says “You’re screwed”. Or a link to inboxzero.
Not The User's Fault 
December 20, 2009 at 9:17 am
I don’t remember seeing that bug in bugzilla – I probably didn’t notice it myself as I don’t use that indicator.
Could you file the bug if you haven’t already ?
December 20, 2009 at 10:51 am
How about when you go over 100, it just shows something like “100+”? Is there much use knowing that you have 14876 instead of 14875 emails? Actually there probably is, I know I’ve lived with things like that and just remember that I have 88 unread emails, so if it shows 89 I’ve received a new one…
December 20, 2009 at 12:23 pm
It should probably stop showing numbers, since by the time you get that high you probably just don’t care anymore.
December 20, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Or just show “14k”, I don’t believe you need a higher precision count when you’re in those sorts of things.
December 20, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Show the infinity sign
Or 10K+ once you get past 9999
December 20, 2009 at 2:33 pm
User’s fault or not, it’s a bug I would have been embarrassed about writing.
December 20, 2009 at 2:50 pm
It should say “15k”, obviously.
December 20, 2009 at 3:09 pm
What if it just showed the number of new messages in the last day (or better, last n days, where n is configurable)?
December 20, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Google Reader shows “1000+” once you exceed that number of unread feed items. Thunderbird could do something similar with “999+” or something.
December 20, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Clearly it should display “14k” 🙂
December 20, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Maybe it is “1487!”, as in “1487 factorial”. That sounds like a lot of email to me.
December 20, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I know this doesn’t impact the importance of this bug, as I am sure it hasn’t been fixed, but that does look like one of the BETAs since I believe the RCs changed it to red to look like the Mail.app count.
December 20, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I just wanted to note that it is amusing 2 commenters recommended that 1,487 be approximated as 14k.
Oh. And also, this blog needs to style color: as well as background-color:. I’m typing a message in barely visible characters.
December 20, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Heh. Actually I’m the idiot who misread the post. For some reason I thought it was display 487 when it should be displaying 1,487.
Ok. Fine. Although probably should be rounded to 15k :-p
December 20, 2009 at 9:53 pm
I rewrote the code for TB3 to deal with this case exactly! I’ve got an extension hook in there so you can change the display when it hits some crazy limit like this. You just need to listen for “before-unread-count-display” and then make it any string you want. See http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mailnews/base/src/nsMessengerOSXIntegration.mm#602 Enjoy!
Dave
December 20, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Naah, it shouldn’t round up. the user might get enthusiastic about hitting the cap of 15k emails while still having only 14,5k ;D
December 21, 2009 at 3:07 am
🙂
I don’t use a Mac, so this bug never affected me, but at the moment I happen to have 14240 unread emails all from bugzilla-daemon@mozilla.org (plus maybe a thousand or two from other sources). Yes, as you say in other words, “beyond ten thousand the particular number is not really meaningful”.
December 21, 2009 at 10:35 am
Not only that, the new mail indicator also replaces the whole icon, instead of just placing a green badge on top of it. It’s a regression, it used to work properly.
Just replace the icon with your own to see the bug in action.
December 21, 2009 at 12:46 pm
LOL! Can someone implement a “you’re stuffed” toaster popup notification as an extension? 🙂
December 21, 2009 at 2:57 pm
I use Mail, and I regularly have more than 10k unread messages (right now: 14348). The last digit is still important: it helps me track when new mail comes in.
Fortunately, mail does not have the same bug.
yrs–
–Ben