1224539 - Reply menu-button needs Call or Chat option

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[daniel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0 Iceweasel/41.0.1
Build ID: 20151005010732

Steps to reproduce:

The message preview panel displays a "Reply" button  and a "Reply All" menu-button.

It would be very useful to have options in the menu-button to reply with a SIP or XMPP session.  I already developed such a feature for K-9 mail and it is very convenient and useful:

https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/pull/866

It adds two new options to the reply/forward menu:
"Call (SIP)"
"Call (XMPP)"

When the user selects one of the options, the reply address should be given to the URI handler for the appropriate scheme "sip:" or "xmpp:" just as if the user had clicked a link in a message body.

It would also be useful to have "Call" options in the context menus that appear when a user right clicks any of the "From" or "To" or "Cc" addresses in the preview panel.

Comment 1

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

This seems like the sort of thing that would make sense as an add-on, at least to start with. It shouldn't be hard to add custom toolbar buttons that do this.

Comment 2

[daniel]

More and more people are computing with devices that have some telephony capability, I feel that makes a strong case for tighter integration, not just an add-on.

It is also good to emphasize that Thunderbird is a communications client and not just an email client.  That also implies that basic support for these other URI schemes should be in your face, just like "http" URLs are highlighted in emails.  If http URLs were not highlighted and a plugin was required, I suspect that over half the users would never install the plugin and just blindly cut-and-paste URLs because they don't know what else to do.