119432 - link newsgroups account "identity" to emailaccount identity

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Jesse Houwing]

I'd like to be able to link my email account to a newsaccount, so when I send
mail to a person from a newsgroup (eg reply to sender), then those messages
should be treated as if they were being sent from my email account.

This would also limit the amount of duplicate emailadresses in the from: list
(compose window).

I currently have 4 newsservers I'm subscribed to. All use the same emailadress
as my main emailaddress (eg [e-mail]). So in each compose
window that emailaddress shows up 5 times (4x news 1x email). This is both
annoying and confusing.

This enhancement would make it possible to link a newsaccount to a emailaccount
(if wanted). If you do that then sent folders, draft folders etc of the
emailaccoutn would be used, security would also be copied to the newsservers
settings, with an extra option to enable signing of news messages.

That about sums it up I think.

Comment 1

[Quinn Yost (mythdraug)]

While there is not a front end available, you can do much of what you describe
by hand editing your prefs.js.  I just completed a cleanup of my mailnews prefs
and elimintated several duplicates and eliminated some accounts from the
folderview while keeping the address valid for outbound mail.

Comment 2

[Jesse Houwing]

That's the other way around.

I want all my emails to be valid, both in folder view and elsewhere.

What I want is that newsgroup-emailaddresses don't show up in the pulldown where
you can select your "from" address in a mailcomposer window.

If you link a email account to a newsgroup account, then the newsgroup's set
emailaddress shouldn't show up in this pulldown list AND the linked emailaddress
should be selected by default.

That's what I'm suggesting

Comment 3

[Henrik Gemal]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 44863 ***

Comment 4

[Jesse Houwing]

This is not a duplicate.

This account requests to be able to use a mail identity for news

the other requests to use multiple settings for one mail or news account. 

Quite a difference

Comment 5

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

1) This should not be OS-dependent.

2) I don't quite understand. How do you get "in each compose
window that emailaddress shows up 5 times"? In each news account you can set the
address (and name) as well as the folder to which things are filed, you can
choose the folders of the appropriate mail account already.

pi

Comment 6

[Jesse Houwing]

Ok.

I have three email account on my system:

[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]

And three news servers (with email/name the same as [e-mail]):

news.cs.utwente.nl
news.utwente.nl
news.bradsoft.com

Now, if I compose a new email and check the drop down box with from information
I can choose from:

Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])

The last three items are added because they're set in my newsgroup serttings. 

Those shouldn't be there in my opinion. I want to link my newsgroups to one mail
account and use the name/email from that account.

So the dropdown should appear as:

Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])

when all my news accounts are linked to j.hohouwing@stu...

and when I set different credentials for one news account it should show:

Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])
Jesse Houwing ([e-mail])

or something.

Comment 7

[Quinn Yost (mythdraug)]

What happens is the following:
  1) User makes some e'mail accounts.
  2) User makes a news account using his/her primary e'mail address as the
     e'mail address for the account.
  3) User then attempts to send a message, selects the dropdown for the from
     address and sees the following:

         +---------------------------------+
   From: | FooBar <[e-mail]>          |v|
         +---------------------------------+
         | FooBar <[e-mail]>            |
         | Foo <[e-mail]>               |
         | FooBar <[e-mail]>            |
         +---------------------------------+

Currently, each mail.account.account[1...].identities has a one to
one correlation to a mail.identity.id[1...].*   To create the dropdown,
the compose window appears to iterate through mail.identity.id[1...]
and add a line to the From: dropdown.

This could be resolved in a couple different ways:
  1) The compose window could only display "unique" mail.identities.
  2) Account creation could allow you to select from existing
     mail.identities rather than creating a new one.

The reporter has requested that the second option be implemented.

Comment 8

[Quinn Yost (mythdraug)]

This is probably an Account Manager issue rather than MailNews Front End.

Comment 9

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

I see the problem with multiple address in the list. But I don't see a need to
link accounts as you suggest. As I said in comment 5 you can achieve the filing
already.

pi

Comment 10

[Olav Vitters]

"Reassign bug to owner of selected component"

Comment 11

[Jesse Houwing]

Linking the address/name settings from a mail account to a news account will
solve the duplicates.

Removing duplicates on name/email base isn't enhough, because when you set a
different smtpserver for each account, only the first one will work.

Duplicating the settings manually will allow me to use the same folders etc (and
I already do this), but makes the list of name/email pair longer for every
newsserver I add. This should not happen.

Comment 12

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 13

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 14

[Jesse Houwing]

(In reply to comment #9)
> I see the problem with multiple address in the list. But I don't see a need to
> link accounts as you suggest. As I said in comment 5 you can achieve the filing
> already.
> 
> pi

The problem does not lie in the place drafts, templates, sent items etc are stored. The problem lies in the dropdown that allows me to specify the From: identity.

The problem also lies in the fact that settings (like organization, reply-to, name, footer etc) are not synchronized between these accounts.

The problem also lies in the fact that when I only address messages to email recipients, that the news identity should not show up altogether. As it does not support sending messages that way. 

It also lies in the fact that when replying to both newsgroup and sender, there is no way to specify which identity to use for the newsgroup, and which for the email. This results in bug 539529 showing up under special circumstances.

So in my opinion it must be possible to add an identity to one or more server (or account) and vice versa.

If I then send a new blank message with both a news recipient and a mail recipient I get the default from identity for that folder, be it mail or news, and if needed a second identity for the other protocol. This could result in:

[compose_________________________[x]
[send][..][..][..]
FROM (mail): [mail identity \/]
FROM (news): [news identity \/]
news: microsoft.some.group
to: [e-mail]

If the mail identity is also linked to the news account, they will be the same. Should the mail identity not be linked to the news account, then the news identity is shown in the news identity drop down.

Comment 16

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

can you envision that this ever being feasible and acceptable?

Comment 17

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

Under the hood, identities are tied in an M-to-N relationship to accounts, although our management UI does a bad job of displaying this fact, and our account creation code blindly always creates new identities. News accounts should, IMHO, definitely try to tie into a default mail identity.

Comment 18

[:aceman]

So the backend can do it (see comment 1) but the frontend can't yet correctly present identities shared by more accounts. Also, what would happen if you wanted to change the identity in one of the accounts but not the other one? There would need to be some "unsharing", creating a copy of the identity. This does not exist yet.

So this is a valid request and nice to have, but the feature would need to be well thought out visually (to not confuse the user) and implemented.