A Better Thunderbird

[leishirsute]

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:

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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.

Traditions get outdated. Business auditing and etiquette require that email replies contain the prior headers to show if cc's and to's lists were modified. "user wrote" doesn't cut it. TB, Mozilla and SeaMonkey email remain toys with that lack of business acumen.



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/

[leishirsute]

"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/"

Someone added to an email thread will not have the past history. This is a thoughtless suggestion.

[leishirsute]

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.

I agree. I love the concept of opensource TB but it's features are not ready for primetime large business concerns and this is a key need of mail tracking.

[WileyDog]

Is there a way to format this "Change the reply header" override to include the headere box that appears when you Forward a message. It seems to have all of the details most would need

[leishirsute]

I currently do that manually. Start a reply, then forward the same message to be able to copy the forward header box, then paste into the reply. You would think the developers of TB, SeaMonkey and Mozilla would havde figured out this business need a while ago.
Outlook does this automatically.

[WileyDog]

I failed to mention, that's what I do as well. There must be a place to pull that source into the Reply format.

[MikeBrumberg]

I saw that in the "Tips & Tricks". I also read about user.js and put all of that into a file in what I "think" is my Profile folder (according to the "Editing Configuration Files"), but nothing changed, even after I restarted TB. What did I do wrong? Is it just a file in the Profile folder or is there a sub-folder?

[leishirsute]

The problem with the tips and tricks I think you are referencing is that it doesn't copy the cc: list to the Reply header.

[RiponEric]

I saw that in the "Tips & Tricks". I also read about user.js and put all of that into a file in what I "think" is my Profile folder (according to the "Editing Configuration Files"), but nothing changed, even after I restarted TB. What did I do wrong? Is it just a file in the Profile folder or is there a sub-folder?

user.js has to be a text file (use TextEdit if you're on a Mac). It works for me, the file has its intended effect (limited to pulling in time and date of original message, as others have pointed out). On a Mac, the path to the folder the user.js file goes into is:
User:Library:Application Support:Thunderbird:Profiles:[8-character letter&number name].default:

[MikeBrumberg]

I saw that in the "Tips & Tricks". I also read about user.js and put all of that into a file in what I "think" is my Profile folder (according to the "Editing Configuration Files"), but nothing changed, even after I restarted TB. What did I do wrong? Is it just a file in the Profile folder or is there a sub-folder?

user.js has to be a text file (use TextEdit if you're on a Mac). It works for me, the file has its intended effect (limited to pulling in time and date of original message, as others have pointed out). On a Mac, the path to the folder the user.js file goes into is:
User:Library:Application Support:Thunderbird:Profiles:[8-character letter&number name].default:

I am using Windows XP, not a Mac. Thanks anyway, but I did edit it as a text file, following the "Editing" instructions and I thought I put in my Profile folder
C:\Documents and Settings\userid\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\user.js
I can open it there, but TB doesn't seem to use it. Is there anything else I need in it? Is there another file I need? Or is it just in the wrong place?

[karnesky]

Thanks anyway, but I did edit it as a text file, following the "Editing" instructions and I thought I put in my Profile folder
C:\Documents and Settings\userid\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\user.js
I can open it there, but TB doesn't seem to use it. Is there anything else I need in it? Is there another file I need? Or is it just in the wrong place?

This "Profiles" folder is the parent directory for all of your profiles. Your profile folder is a child of this directory that is named xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters.

Place user.js there.

[MikeBrumberg]

Thanks anyway, but I did edit it as a text file, following the "Editing" instructions and I thought I put in my Profile folder
C:\Documents and Settings\userid\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\user.js
I can open it there, but TB doesn't seem to use it. Is there anything else I need in it? Is there another file I need? Or is it just in the wrong place?

This "Profiles" folder is the parent directory for all of your profiles. Your profile folder is a child of this directory that is named xxxxxxxx.default\, where xxxxxxxx is a random string of 8 characters.

Place user.js there.

Thanks. I was wondering about those. My only problem now is that I have two of those xxxxxxxx.default folders. How do I figure out which is the right one? Where, if anywhere, is this documeted?

This is just a curiosity. The answer may be needed in the future, but I have since solved my problem by installing the "Thunderbird Reset Quote Header" extension, which works well for me.

Mike

[hugoread]

For me all this talk of business vs home user isn't really relevant. I like a full thread in the last email, so that when I go back to a thread in months or years gone by, I can read it from the bottom up like a history, hopefully a funny one from a bunch of friends, but possibly a boring work thread that I need to read. Suggesting that I 'should' open each email separately to read the chain is ridiculous; as an end user I just want to read the chain in one go in one window. And I want to see who was or wasn't included in each email as the thread progresses. Also I most certainly can't be bothered to pick a certain part to quote; it's just totally unrealistic. Everyone I know (who mainly unfortunately use Outlook or Outlook Express), just hit 'Reply to all' and the chain goes on. After the chain has died it's natural death I quite often delete all but the last email in the thread, as that has all the history. Having said that, I'm not bothered about storgage space; to me that's a complete non issue. Whole DVDs on hard drive might have storage space issues, but an email thread most certainly doesn't.

That's how I like to use email anyway. As does everyone else I know.

Ta.

[dtobias]

People who think like that sometimes end up quoting back entire digests of mailing lists like <a href="http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/magicu-l/message/34882">this</a>. Or, at least, they end up with heaps of trailing garbage in list messages like:

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> > > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > > FooBar-l mailing list
> > > > > FooBar-l@Foobar.example
> > > > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > > > > http://mail.foobar.example/mailman/listinfo/FooBar-l
> > > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > FooBar-l mailing list
> > > > FooBar-l@Foobar.example
> > > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > > > http://mail.foobar.example/mailman/listinfo/FooBar-l
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > FooBar-l mailing list
> > > FooBar-l@Foobar.example
> > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > > http://mail.foobar.example/mailman/listinfo/FooBar-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > FooBar-l mailing list
> > FooBar-l@Foobar.example
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.foobar.example/mailman/listinfo/FooBar-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> FooBar-l mailing list
> FooBar-l@Foobar.example
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.foobar.example/mailman/listinfo/FooBar-l
>

(taken from an actual recent mailing list posting, with the names changed to protect the guilty)

[hugoread]

"people who think like that" just want to read an email chain from start to finish without opening several windows. Who cares about all the trailing footers, just ignore them, it doesn't matter.