140377 - Make e-mail address available for attribution line (reply header)

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

This bug is to revert (at least partially) bug 38494.

The e-mail address of the author of the previous message is relevant
information. E.g., if someone wants to see why this message is not available, it
is very useful to know the address (the posting might got filtered by a
\.invalid$ rule for example). Further, the address is much more useful than a
name (not even close to unique) when searching for a message in an archive like
Google.

So the address should at least be optionally available.

pi

Comment 1

[Holger Metzger]

yes, i'd also prefer the email address rather than the quite useless date/time
option.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 258614 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Bill Stewart]

I'll second (third?) this request. I would like to be able to use the e-mail address in the attribution line for newsgroup posts.

Comment 4

[Peter Lairo]

Often the e-mail address isn't such that the person's name, and thus, the person, is identifiable from it. I would argue, that, therefore, the person's name is more relevant. So given only an either-or choice, I suggest WONTFIX.

One solution could be to provide both the name and e-mail:

Peter Lairo ([e-mail]) wrote on 30.09.2006 14:52:

Another option, limited to HTML e-mails, would be to create a mailto link of the person's name, which contains their e-mail address:

<a href="mailto:[e-mail]">Peter Lairo</a> wrote on 30.09.2006 14:52:

PS. Could someone please make the above ordering (name first, then date/time) the default? Who said something is far more relevant than when something was said.

Comment 5

[Boris 'pi' Piwinger]

The name alone is far from unique. So the address is an important additional informatoin. Also if later on more people are included, they often have no clue how to contact the person mentioned earlier or where they belong. You often see it with the Outlook way of answering. You just see names, don't get the idea if they are in the same or another company and cannot contact them directly.

pi

Comment 7

[rsx11m]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Often the e-mail address isn't such that the person's name, and thus, the
> person, is identifiable from it. I would argue, that, therefore, the person's
> name is more relevant. So given only an either-or choice, I suggest WONTFIX.

This is not necessarily an either/or issue. As a simple approach to allow both variants, the mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote preference could be extended.
The current default of "%s wrote" is used as an sprintf()-like formatting string, receiving either the author name or the e-mail address if no real name exists. A second argument could be added, being "<email>" if a name is present or "" if not. In this way, a preference value of "%s%s wrote" would result in "Name <address> wrote" or just "address wrote", depending on whether or not the name is provided, whereas the behavior of the current default formatting string wouldn't change.

Comment 8

[Renato S. Yamane]

I do not agree with this request.

If my e-mail is printed in all repplys, I will increase my received spam messages, because Google can index all messages available in Mailing Lists with no-hide option.

If you have the name, you know the e-mail.
If you don't have him e-mail, it is because the owner don't let you know about it.

Regards,
Renato

Comment 9

[rsx11m]

(In reply to comment #8)
> If my e-mail is printed in all repplys, I will increase my received spam
> messages, because Google can index all messages available in Mailing Lists with
> no-hide option.

The aim of this enhancement request should certainly be to make this an optional feature, thus one can choose whether or not the e-mail address should also be included if a display name is given. The default could be the current string, thus one would need to change it on purpose to include the address.

A more general solution for this issue would be a single reply-header string with variable substitutions, suggested in bug 171822 comment #25 and following. I'm adding this as dependency since it would also take care of the issue under discussion here (and to keep track of the various related bugs).

Comment 10

[HHahn]

A year and a half ago I added comments to bug regarding multi-language aspects to bug 107884 (comments 78, 78 and 80). In the current thread I am missing these aspects. It is not only about name and/or e-mail address. Other paramaters, such as date and time, are involved, too, and they may have to appear at different positions in the text depending on the language. And, as I pointed out at bug 107884, the language is not necessarily the same as the OS locale language or the TB user interface language. People may want to write in a foreign language as well!
Please do take this into account!

Comment 11

[rsx11m]

I agree, but this specific bug here is on adding a form "Author <address>" as
an option to the reply headers. Thus, whatever localization may be necessary should be considered here (I'd guess none, as this format is given by RFC822).

For the general issue of allowing reply headers in multiple languages, and selecting those per message, there is another bug 450638 on this.

Comment 12

[John]

Just FYI, by a little trial and error I figured out how to get the attribution line to display "Name <email>" instead of just "<Name>".  Set "mailnews.reply_header_authorwrote" to this:

%0.0s%s wrote

In more general terms, use "%0.0s%s" instead of "%s".  Obviously this is a workaround, since Joe User can't be expected to fine-tune an attribution line by tweaking printf escape sequence modifiers, but it does get the job done.  :)

Comment 13

[rsx11m]

> (comment #12) %0.0s%s wrote

This looks more like a bug than a feature. ;-) Anyway, it doesn't work for me on current trunk builds, I only get " wrote:" then without any author at all.

Comment 14

[John]

Oh, it's definitely shenanigans.  :)  I'm just saying, until something better comes along, you can do this.

I definitely should have mentioned what version of Thunderbird I'm using, though...slipped my mind.  This is 2.0.0.22 as packaged by Kubuntu Jaunty; FWIW, it also worked in whatever version came with Kubuntu Dapper.

Comment 15

[John Howard]

This would be a welcome addition.  I'm using SeaMonkey, and the above workaround doesn't work for me either.  Gmail uses both the original e-mailer's name and the e-mail address when sending a reply, so this is becoming more and more standard.  As in, "On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 5:01 PM, John Doe <[e-mail]> wrote:"

Comment 16

[Nikolay Shopik]

> %0.0s%s 
Now just crashing TB.

Anyway option for email it must, as it common when you receive email and they use only First Name or just some generic "support" name and you reply it with CC someone else, he/she may find difficult to figure out who is wrote that.