1291154 - [Feature request] Icons, Unread count on mailbox tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 748950

(Thunderbird :: Toolbars and Tabs, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Kiran]

Attachment: tbird-ui-feature-request.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Build ID: 20160623154057

Steps to reproduce:

I use Thunderbird client to view multiple email accounts. I keep every account's inbox open as a tab. I find it easier to view my emails by just visiting a tab. Approximately 5 accounts.
The information displayed on a tab is not sufficient to let me know which inbox is present there. 
Because of my regular use, I am able to guess the tab am in, by its position. 



Expected results:

I would like the tabs to contain a favicon / image representing the inbox. Also the number of unread mails there. 
I have attached a roughly constructed image, which illustrates the requirement that I have.

Comment 1

[Kiran]

I would like to work on this issue. I do not have any experience contributing to Thunderbird, but am willing to learn and attempt this. 
Any suggestions on how I can go about this?

Comment 2

[Kent James (:rkent)]

As I see it, there are several proposals here.

1) Provide customized icons per account (Yahoo, not sure what the Z is).
2) For tabs, reflect the account icon rather than the inbox icon in the tab.
3) Add an unread count to the tabs.

My first inclination is that this would best be done as an extension.

The first part in particular requires a list of icons for various proprietary email providers, and would require additional customization for new vendors. Specific vendor support is always problematic in Thunderbird (though it is occasionally done). Doing that in core, correctly, is not a trivial project, and probably should involve some method that vendors can add icons. (I'm not aware of any existing way that supports that, but this is not my area of expertise either. Is there any concept of favicons for email accounts, or could it be added to autoconfig (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Thunderbird/Autoconfiguration/FileFormat/HowTo)?

This work is also dependent on your very specific workflow, which is to use tabs to display inboxes. I don't use that workflow, but I solve the same problem by implementing (in a personal extension) a dropdown that allows the folder pane to show different subcategories, including "Unread Folders".

For an extension, you can just do the work and add it to the addons site. If you want to include this in the core code, you should really get a preliminary approval from Magnus and Richard prior to doing any actual coding (I've added them to the cc list).

Comment 3

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

(In reply to Kent James (:rkent) from comment #2)
> As I see it, there are several proposals here.
> 
> 1) Provide customized icons per account (Yahoo, not sure what the Z is).
> 2) For tabs, reflect the account icon rather than the inbox icon in the tab.

For both we have already bug 748950.

> 3) Add an unread count to the tabs.

Indeed this is a special case and should first be done in a extension.

Comment 4

[Kiran]

Kent, and Richard,
Thank you for your detailed replies. 
I will follow bug 748950, to see if I can help there in anyway. 
I will also explore the option of creating an extension for this. This looks like the best place to start learning about this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Thunderbird/Building_a_Thunderbird_extension

Do I have to 'close' this enhancement request, and if so can you let me know how I can do that.
Thanks, again.

Comment 5

[Kent James (:rkent)]

Let's just dup to bug 748950 since that is most of the request.