1069279 - Missing a "marked as replied" option for POP3 accounts.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[teo8976]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1 Right-Click on a message
2 move the mouse cursor over the "mark" item in the context menu
3 see the submenu


Actual results:

There's no option to mark the message as replied


Expected results:

There should be an option to mark the message as replied, for two reasons:

1 - there are a number of bugs that occasionally cause messages that have been replied to not be marked as such. In my case it has happened once and it didn't seem to meet any of the conditions described in known bugs that cause messages to systematically not be marked as replied under certain circumstances. It had never happened to  me before, it seems something random and sporadic but i definitely did reply to the message; my reply is there in the Sent folder

2 - even if TB was perfect and never failed to mark replied messages as replied, you still may want to do so manually if, for example, you have composed a reply to that message without using the reply option proper, or even if you have replied to that person some other way than via email. Just as you can manuallty mark as read a message that you haven't read, or viceversa, then why shouldn't you be able to arbitrarily mark a message as replied??

Comment 1

[Josiah Bruner [:jsbruner]]

I'm not sure this is possible and even if it was, it shouldn't be. We pull the replied information from the server (I'm assuming IMAP here), and I'm not sure we can change that as a toggle (But perhaps we can).

As to your point 1. Could you point me to some bugs. I would rather we fix those than implement some workaround.

Point 2: I don't really think that's a valid reason to change it. Other clients depend on some of these flags to group information, and it may cause problems if we claim "replied" when you never did reply.

Perhaps someone who has a little more IMAP experience than me could give feedback as well, but I just don't think this is a valid suggestion.

Comment 2

[teo8976]

> (I'm assuming IMAP here)

Wrong assumption.
My bad not specifying it, but I'm using POP3.

Your reasoning may apply to IMAP but I don't think it applies to POP3. Is there such a flag on the server side in POP3?? Even if there was, given that a POP3 client essentially downloads a local copy of the message (whether or not it deletes it from the server), the whole thing should be managed locally, and hence it makes perfect sense to allow to mark as replied manually.

Comment 3

[Josiah Bruner [:jsbruner]]

Yes, alright that's a different story, and something I don't have a lot of experience with (I only use IMAP), so I'm going to get an opinion from some of the other UI guys.

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

I think this should stay as automatism when a message is replied in TB (naturally it's a bug when this fails because of network errors etc.).

You could use the tags to mark a message when it is replied outside TB. The advantage would also be to set fine grained tags like "Replied by other mail", "Replied on phone" etc.

When you have a message with manually set replied state and think two month later "okay, I replied this message and I need now what I wrote 2 month ago" and now search the message by 'open message in conversation' or a other method and don't find the reply. What do you think about TB not showing the reply because there was newer a reply in TB? Oh TB has eaten my reply, this is a bug? With a tag you could know immediately there is no reply in TB because you phoned then.

I'm more for a WONTFIX of this bug.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Regarding #2 I agree, we should not go down the path of manually marking messages in a non-standard way


Regarding #1, Josiah is spot on, if you can reproduce this then it deserves a bug report.

Comment 6

[teo8976]

Regarding again #2.

Here is another reason that perhaps may convince you of the need for this feature (in one form or another).

I use gmail, and sometimes reply to messages from the web interface, or from the mobile app, instead of in TB.

Those messages are downloaded in the Inbox, and they are not recognized by TB as replies to the messages to which they are a reply.

So, in these cases you actually HAVE replied to a message, and need to manually mark it. It's not the same as wanting to fake it.

Perhaps the needed feature is not "mark as replied" as i described in the OR, but "link to a given conversation". You do have the message that is the reply (which has been downloaded in the inbox and which I usually manually move to Sent), which is the answer to the objection in Comment 4.
What is needed is the ability to tell TB: "Message X is a reply to message Y. Alter either or both as needed to reflect that" at least when there's no inconsistency (that cannot be modified) that makes that impossible.

Comment 7

[teo8976]

(when I say "those messages" I mean my replies)

Comment 8

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

> Perhaps the needed feature is not "mark as replied" as i described in the OR, but "link to a given conversation".

Yes (though there's a bug for that). Marking as replied is not related to conversations.