1226525 - Email voting mechanism

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Untriaged, enhancement)

Description

[u555946]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0
Build ID: 20151029151421

Steps to reproduce:

It would be appreciated if emails could be sent with voting buttons, options include:
{Approve;Reject}, {Yes;No}, {Yes;No;Maybe}, {Custom}

When reply emails are received with the voting, it would be great if Thunderbird would collate the votes in the sent email.

Thank you

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I can't imagine how this would be used in a way that wouldn't be better handled by web survey systems.
Do you have a specific use case in mind?

Comment 2

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

How would this even work? We can't add some new feature to messages, since other clients wouldn't be able to understand it. It would also be hard to do this with the current MIME feature set; the best you could do is make a mailto: link for each response, but the user would still have to manually send the email.

This seems like something that belongs in an add-on, if at all. Then, say, if a corporation wanted this, they could just install the add-on.

Comment 3

[u555946]

Thank you Wayne Mery & Jim Porter for your questions.

@Wayne Mery: A specific use case is community organisations (eg. committee) voting. Community organisation can vote by email easier than setting up a web survey system.

@Jim Porter: Could work similar to Read Receipts, once implement, in Email Tracking. This feature works in our standalone version of Outlook 2010, even though MS support says that “A Microsoft Exchange Server account is required.”
https://support.office.com/en-au/article/Create-and-send-a-voting-poll-in-an-email-message-32b34320-a8c8-4b49-8f2d-9609188cd396
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Create-polls-in-e-mail-messages-and-review-the-results-4d10e079-8ea1-489a-a79c-18cb71ae12dd

The voting could be extended to allow for voting on more than one item in an email; however, if this is not initially implemented, it can be overcome by have multiple emails with 1 voting item per email.

Comment 4

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Thunderbird supports Read Receipts because they're a part of an open standard (RFC 3798). While you could extend the RFC to support something like this, it wouldn't be compatible with other mail clients, making it not very useful. Part of the point of Thunderbird is that it works even if the recipient *doesn't* use Thunderbird.

Similarly, Thunderbird doesn't support Exchange, so we can't just use Microsoft's method here either. My guess is that recipients would have to be on the *same* Exchange server, further limiting the usefulness.

In any case, I don't see how this is easier than using something like Google Forms.

Comment 5

[u555946]

(In reply to Jim Porter (:squib) from comment #4)
> Thunderbird supports Read Receipts because they're a part of an open
> standard (RFC 3798). While you could extend the RFC to support something
> like this, it wouldn't be compatible with other mail clients, making it not
> very useful. Part of the point of Thunderbird is that it works even if the
> recipient *doesn't* use Thunderbird.
Do you know who we should contact on the open standards committee to incorporate email voting in the standard?

> Similarly, Thunderbird doesn't support Exchange, so we can't just use
> Microsoft's method here either. My guess is that recipients would have to be
> on the *same* Exchange server, further limiting the usefulness.
It works with just Microsoft Outlook (the client), *no* Exchange required.

> In any case, I don't see how this is easier than using something like Google
> Forms.
Easier than Google Forms and you just select Voting options before an email is sent.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to ovari21 from comment #5)
> (In reply to Jim Porter (:squib) from comment #4)
> > Thunderbird supports Read Receipts because they're a part of an open
> > standard (RFC 3798). While you could extend the RFC to support something
> > like this, it wouldn't be compatible with other mail clients, making it not
> > very useful. Part of the point of Thunderbird is that it works even if the
> > recipient *doesn't* use Thunderbird.
> Do you know who we should contact on the open standards committee to
> incorporate email voting in the standard?

You would need to develop and write the RFC. Then submit the RFC, https://www.ietf.org/

> > Similarly, Thunderbird doesn't support Exchange, so we can't just use
> > Microsoft's method here either. My guess is that recipients would have to be
> > on the *same* Exchange server, further limiting the usefulness.
> It works with just Microsoft Outlook (the client), *no* Exchange required.
> 
> > In any case, I don't see how this is easier than using something like Google
> > Forms.
> Easier than Google Forms and you just select Voting options before an email
> is sent.

Easier perhaps only if you have the tools to both agregate and validate the votes at the receiver. 

My eliminating/dismissing the web, you also eliminate all the richness and flexibility it can provide in the voting process. Plus people who do not use email, like social media - which would not be good. Conversely, everyone uses the web - including those who use email.

And there are many voting tools available on the web, including free ones https://www.google.com/search?num=20&safe=off&q=web+voting+tools+%22open+source%22+OR+free&oq=web+voting+tools+%22open+source%22+OR+free

For the reasons above, I really don't see this gaining wide interest. At best, for now this is an addon idea as squib suggests. And beyond that, impossible without an RFC for guidance.  So for now, it's not something we'd do in core Thunderbird functionality