169614 - Should not allow empty/blank subject for news messages

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[John Moreno]

The GNKSA has a MUST for non-empty Subjects.

  11a  Does not require a non-empty, user-specified subject

NNTP servers will reject posts without a Subject and for good reasons, Mozilla 
shouldn't be subverting such restrictions by providing a non-user entered 
Subject.

Comment 1

[Jonas Jørgensen]

--> Composition; fixing reverse summary; confirming.

Note that this change should be newsgroups only -- it should still be possible
to write emails with blank subjects.

Comment 2

[Jonadab the Unsightly One (Nathan Eady)]

It's good to see GNKSA getting some attention...

> it should still be possible to write emails with blank subjects

If so, this should generate a warning, unless the user has done
something to disable the warning.  But that's another bug.

Comment 3

[Jonas Jørgensen]

>> it should still be possible to write emails with blank subjects
> 
> If so, this should generate a warning, unless the user has done
> something to disable the warning.  But that's another bug.

It already _does_ generate a warning. And there's a bug 119684 about _not_ doing
that.

Comment 4

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

-->varada

Comment 5

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

taking all of varada's bugs.

Comment 6

[Karsten Düsterloh]

20030519 Win2k

If I compose a posting without subject, the standard mail warnig dialog pops up.
It presents a default subject string, that I can delete (hence sending a
subjectless post to the server and getting a respective server error).

So is this bug about automatically setting the subject header before sending,
without further user interaction?

This is not a good way to go, IMHO.

If the user deletes the default string (see above), we should alert about not
sending because of this and return to the mail editor window.
(Maybe we shouldn't even bring up the 'enter subject' dialog at all.)

Comment 7

[John Moreno]

> So is this bug about automatically setting the subject header
> before sending, without further user interaction?

No, not at all -- that would be bad.

> If the user deletes the default string (see above), we should
> alert about not sending because of this and return to the mail
> editor window. (Maybe we shouldn't even bring up the 'enter
> subject' dialog at all.)

Yes, that's approximately what this bug is for -- don't send, don't provide 
some fake default string; force the user to enter something.

Comment 8

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

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 9

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

unclear to me whether this is backend or frontend compose, so leaving as backend