A Better Thunderbird

[DanRaisch]

LOL. It must be a really small company if it can get by with an e-mail program that replies to e-mails with...

Joe Blow wrote:

No way to back track messages.

Go back and read my post, friend. At least 35,000 employees would not constitute a small company by the average person's estimates.

And richard_leeds is correct: Before locking out the installation of additional extensions in the final installed version (to prevent user created conflict problems) our IT installed some tweaks, extensions, and a localized theme to make a company specific version of TB. But those same extensions, theme changes, and, in many cases code tweaks, are equally available to the general user.

[dtobias]

The traditional netiquette for reply formatting is to trim down the original message to the minimum needed to establish context, and then reply contextually beneath each relevant piece. The use of a compact attribution line instead of the big honkin' hunk of crap used by Outhouse, and the prefixing of quotes with angle brackets, make sense in this context.

Sample:

Code: Select all

Jane Doe said:
> Why did the chicken cross the road?

To get to the other side, of course.

> And why is it a chicken and not a turkey?

Because turkeys are too dumb to cross roads by themselves.  They're a lot like M$ Outhouse users and top-posters.

If somebody wants to see the entire past history of the thread, they should look at the earlier messages directly instead of expecting them to be wastefully attached in full (headers, trailers, and all) to every subsequent message.

http://mailformat.dan.info/quoting/

[richard_leeds]

The traditional netiquette for reply formatting is to trim down the original message ....

If somebody wants to see the entire past history of the thread, they should look at the earlier messages directly instead of expecting them to be wastefully attached in full (headers, trailers, and all) to every subsequent message.

I agree with you wrt discussion boards, forums, and groups.

A discussion forum is always located in one place. The user goes to look at the board/forum to see what is being talked about. The board/forum lists the discussion pieces in context and one can simply scroll down and everything is neatly presented....


... however emails are used differently.


For example, I often get copied in on replies to emails at work where people say "Richard, what do you think about this?". There is no central archive on a board/forum for that discussion. So my first thought might be "Have you told Bill?", but in TB there would be no record if Bill was copied in on the correspondence.

Even worse is my colleague who always deletes the previous text when he replies. Also you advocate selective quotes. As I said, this works for discussion boards, but in an email context this assumes:

- The recipients have been copied in on previous correspondence
- The recipients have neat filing systems so can easily find the previous emails
- The recipients have the time to go rummaging through their filing to find the previous emails
- The recipients are online, or had the psychic foresight that they needed to synchronize that particular set of emails from the public folder.

Anyway, that's all IMHO. Fortunately, TB does give the option to include previous emails in replies, and also gives the option to top post so that readers see the newest bit when they open the message instead of having to scroll down.

[richard_leeds]

The end result will be [authorwrote][separator][ondate][colon]

That only partly helps. That tells us "John Smith wrote on Monday 1 Jan 2006" ... but we haven't a clue who he wrote to.

For some reason, the developers thought it worthwhile for the "Forward" function, this shows the correct header info. Why not do the same for replies?

Is it possible to write some lines in the user.js to set up replies with the header info?

[DanRaisch]

First, try the extension you referred to earlier -- http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=2626

[richard_leeds]

First, try the extension you referred to earlier -- http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic=2626

aha - that's the one ... been searching but not finding it

thanks

[DanRaisch]

You're welcome.

[Marcelo Boufleur]

If you don´t mind me going with the thread, there´s also one more thing atop of the quote format of replies todays. It´s the replies themselves...

It´s incredible how people tend to use e-mail (I thought of saying "today", but I guess it´s always been like this), and not cut the e-mail´s body to enshorten the message or just to keep the necessary parts or replies to make the whole context understandable.

Noooo sir, they have to leave it all quoted for several e-mails regardless of the ongoing message size´s and not to mention the waste of space for storage in most cases.

So resuming, organizing quoting and reply formating is essential, but is there an extension that could separate new e-mail from replies and organize all the messages (sort of like Gmail could do)?

PS: And even if it wouldn´t be an extension for it, how about an extension that could at least scan all my e-mails and format them all (quoting and headers) and apply my preferences to formatting issues?

[richard_leeds]

It´s incredible how people tend to use e-mail (I thought of saying "today", but I guess it´s always been like this), and not cut the e-mail´s body to enshorten the message or just to keep the necessary parts or replies to make the whole context understandable.

Noooo sir, they have to leave it all quoted for several e-mails regardless of the ongoing message size´s and not to mention the waste of space for storage in most cases.

Quoting in full means those who are offline downloading or using a Blackberry have the past correspondence to hand.

Yes the cost of storage is huge, but the cost of wasted employee time searching for past correspondence is greater, and the cost of lawsuits when we can't find the smoking gun email is yet another order greater. Sorry, in my workplace, top posting above full quotes is essential!

However...... what would be good would be a routine that compares two emails saved in the same folder and realises that one is a reply which quotes the first in full, hence the earlier email can be deleted. Conversely, if someone replied to me with selective quoting, then the original email would be kept. The idea is that there is always one full transcript of the conversation and only duplicates are deleted.

[Marcelo Boufleur]

That would work wonderfully! How difficult would it be to achieve such function?

(Plus the reformating of quote formats...)

[JamesIsIn]

... err .... what does "collected adresses" mean ???

Actually, collected addresses are all address that Thunberbird has seen in any e-mail. The option to save outgoing addresses to your [choose one] address book is separate.

Also, BTJustice, I used to work for the country's largest public research institution (University of Washington--they wrote Pine) and once Thunderbird turned 1.0 the central computer support group began supporting it. Thunderbird use was already pretty rampant by then. It has only increased since.

I would encourage you to participate in the Calendar project (Sunbird). It's at .3 and it's coming along nicely. Once Sunbird is fully functional there will be much lower motivation for folks to insist upon Outlook/Exchange. (I agree that the lack of calendaring is a real bummer for Thunderbird.) Download it and start using/testing it. I am and I don't code.

Lastly, in response to Richard again, I would not want to see quoted messages deleted (it may be useful to see a timeline picture) but perhaps something where duplicated lines are compressed and remembered could be of the same service.


James

[Marcelo Boufleur]

Lastly, in response to Richard again, I would not want to see quoted messages deleted (it may be useful to see a timeline picture) but perhaps something where duplicated lines are compressed and remembered could be of the same service.
James

There is already an extension for Thunderbird that does it: quote collapse
Although not perfect (because it can´t correctly identify certain replied e-mails), it does its job.

I guess an user could have options for different situations. If it is really necessary to keep replies, one could simply reformat the incoming e-mail´s body and apply quote formating to their likes (as one would wish then to be, and not like these are today with several e-mail clients applying their own quote format), or one could just have a function that would search through previous e-mails at the moment of message receipt, and give the user the chance to erase the previous replies from the body - or the previous messages.

Just remembering: I´m not a programmer, so I´m really not sure how difficult it would be to achieve such solution. I´m just trying to make an analogy to something that I first saw in GMail...

[richard_leeds]

one could just have a function that would search through previous e-mails at the moment of message receipt, and give the user the chance to erase the previous replies from the body - or the previous messages.

That's what I was thinking of.

Unfortunately it's only an academic thought since I only really need this for work and that's firmly in the grip of Outlook.

[Canyonero]

Just remembering: I´m not a programmer, so I´m really not sure how difficult it would be to achieve such solution. I´m just trying to make an analogy to something that I first saw in GMail...

I'm all for a big rewrite to create a more GMail like, conversation system too. Something that can take the last 100 emails(w/ and w/out attachments) between me and my bosses, some stored locally, some on the IMAP server, etc. and create a coherent set of messages. Unfortunately... well, I'm not sure it has any chance of happening.

[RiponEric]

Re: See DanRaisch's reply above in this thread on adding code to the user.js file so reply headers can be altered:

On a Mac, the [date] function actually picks up date and time of the original message. When set to '2', reply headers then look like this (copied from a sample message; editing the text in option #3 actually will change the text when the option is set to 2 - not sure if this is a tiny bug):
On 8/22/06 3:14 PM John Smith wrote:

Could this be built in as a user option via menu selection or preferences instead of via the more cumbersome user.js file? Would be more user friendly.