474710 - messagereader: compact message header missing visual cues to distinguish To/Cc/Bcc

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

There's a set of email users who use To and Cc fairly carefully and use it to provide semantic cues on who is expected to react how to the content.  Being fairly technical, many folks in the Mozilla community belong to this set.  As a result, I regularly get mail for which the short header shows several recipients and for which the sender asks "you" to take some action.  I find myself having to view source for the messages in order to figure out whether I'm on the To list and need to take some action as opposed to on the Cc list and don't need to react specifically to the message.  Even in message without explicit "you" references in the body, the sender sometimes provides queues about who they expect responses from vs not.

Comment 1

[Ronald Killmer]

I know from my years in the US Army that it's correspondence procedures make extensive use of CC: to maintain co-ordination between offices with an interest in actions pending.

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Regressing a common workflow like this in a way that's only workaroundable using View Source seems just bad; marking as blocking-thunderbird3+.  Reassigning to clarkbw, as this needs UI before it can move forward.

Comment 3

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Will look into this.  I'm not sure what the right kind of indication would be.

Comment 4

[Shane Caraveo]

Just got bit by the lack of visual indication that I was BCCd an email.  Responding sent to all to/cc recipients.

+1 on TB3 having some visual indicator (hell, make the header section red for bcc recipients) that I've been BCCd.

Comment 5

[David Ascher (:davida)]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Just got bit by the lack of visual indication that I was BCCd an email. 
> Responding sent to all to/cc recipients.
> 
> +1 on TB3 having some visual indicator (hell, make the header section red for
> bcc recipients) that I've been BCCd.

Great idea, but a different bug I think.  Created bug 478434 to handle it.

Comment 6

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

As per <http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dmose/archives/2009/06/thunderbird_compact_header_mov.html>, the compact header is no longer part of the Thunderbird core, so this bug is no longer valid.