418818 - Need more efficient and keyboard-accessible UI for attaching existing email messages during composition

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[John Kitz]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: N/A

I suggest to expand the functionality of the "attach" feature in the email compose window. Today an email from another Thunderbird folder can only be attached by first saving the email to be attached, e.g. on the desktop, and subsequently attaching the .eml file by means of the "attach file" feature.

Ideally it should be possible to embed an email in another email (OLE), but it would already be an enhancement it would be possible to attach an email to another email, without first having to save the email to be attached as. eml file.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
N/A
Actual Results:  
N/A

Expected Results:  
N/A

N/A

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

You can do that by dragging a mail to the attachments pane.

Comment 2

[John Kitz]

Thanks for your reply. I tried it and it works. Although it's not obvious since when I open a new email, there's no attachments pane. So I need to drag it to the area where the attachments pane will be created if there are attachments. Also it requires me to reorder the windows of the inbox and the new email to be able to drag an object between the two. Some changes still seem to be in order to improve the experienced functionality.

Comment 3

[Tim Clutton]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Thanks for your reply. I tried it and it works. Although it's not obvious since
> when I open a new email, there's no attachments pane. So I need to drag it to
> the area where the attachments pane will be created if there are attachments.
> Also it requires me to reorder the windows of the inbox and the new email to be
> able to drag an object between the two. Some changes still seem to be in order
> to improve the experienced functionality.
> 

Comment 4

[Tim Clutton]

(In reply to comment #3)

Apologies for the extraneous comment(#3) - I merely meant to add myself to the CC list.

Comment 5

[Dmitri Minaev]

I'd like to bring this feature request back to life. The problem is that drag-n-drop is extremely uncomfortable. First, it requires mouse. Second, when your windows are maximized (or, in my case, when a tiling window manager is used), you have to  resize your message window, then to resize the main TB window, then move them so the message you want to attach is visible and only then you can drag and drop it into the new message window.

I suggest this function may be performed from keyboard. For example, by copying messages in the main window and pasting them in the new message window.

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Confirming as an idea for enhancement which needs to be explored (ui-wanted).

Attaching email(s) is a reasonable use case, for which the current drag-n-drop UI is clearly inefficient/insufficient. Furthermore, it's not accessible for keyboard users. Workarounds like forwarding emails and then add other attachments are not very intuitive, either, plus they don't cover all use cases (try forwarding emails from different folders in the same mail).

Next steps:

Please provide details for the desired UI and behaviour (mockup-screenshots, add-ons).

Comment 7

[John Kitz]

Ticket may be closed as far as I'm concerned, since I've discontinued using TB long since opening this feature request due to limited functionality over other products.

Suggestions to remove me from future updates of this ticket appreciated.

Comment 8

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

(In reply to John Kitz from comment #7)
> Suggestions to remove me from future updates of this ticket appreciated.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email

Comment 9

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

Oops I chopped off my explanation. That link allows you to change email notifications - if that helps. If it is just this ticket spam that bothers you, I'm not sure how to suppress just that.

Comment 10

[John Kitz]

I guess there's a difference between receiving updates from tickets which one has reported over tickets to which one has added one's email address to the CC list. Tnx. for the suggestion nonetheless.