1705100 - New suggest using BCC instead warning takes no account of mailing lists

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Dave Royal]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0

Steps to reproduce:

Bug 271405 introduced a warning if too many TO or CC recipients are entered.

It does not count the number of recipients in a mailing list. So a mailing list of 50 recipients is counted as one, and does not generate the warning.

Accidentally including a mailing list in TO rather that BCC is, I think, a problem that this warning should address. It's what the addons 'Use BCC Instead' and 'Limit non-BCC recipients' both do.

Using TB 89.0a1 (2021-04-14) (64-bit)

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Absolutely, Dave, thanks for pointing this out.

Comment 2

[Dave Royal]

And mailing lists can be nested.

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

We should add some data to the pill around here: https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/6dbfd83437bab124d39332c768a5f55a36e7a196/mail/base/content/mailWidgets.js#2146 - maybe add a data-addresses attribute and put the addresses into that. Then adjust the bcc warning code to look at that. https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/6dbfd83437bab124d39332c768a5f55a36e7a196/mailnews/addrbook/public/nsIAbDirectory.idl#163

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

CC Alex (:aleca, UX) and Geoff (:darktrojan, address book) who might have insights on possible implementations here.

Given that mailing lists can be nested, and their current implementation leaves a lot to desire (unless it has changed in the meantime), this may not be trivial - see some of my questions below.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #3)

We should add some data to the pill around here: https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/6dbfd83437bab124d39332c768a5f55a36e7a196/mail/base/content/mailWidgets.js#2146 - maybe add a data-addresses attribute and put the addresses into that. Then adjust the bcc warning code to look at that. https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/6dbfd83437bab124d39332c768a5f55a36e7a196/mailnews/addrbook/public/nsIAbDirectory.idl#163

Are we trying to change the way mailing lists work? Or we are just trying to know how many members are in a mailing list?

• If it's only about numbers, maybe adding a number attribute would be enough.
• What about nested mailing lists?
• Do we need to iterate 1000 members to know that we're above 15 (or whatever the user-defined threshold is)?
• What if the user changes the number of (nested) mailing list members from AB or side bar while the mailing list is already a pill in a composition?
• How hard would it be for a mailing list pill to listen to changes of itself in the AB?
• If we'd be able to listen from the pill to changes of the underlying mailing list, we could show a dynamic number of members on the mailing list pill.

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

That sounds like drastic over-engineering for a case that almost never would happen. It's not like it's the end of the world if the number changed either: the number we chose as limit is very arbitrary.

Comment 6

[Lasana Murray]

Attachment: Bug 1705100 - Include mailing list address count in many public recipients warning. r?mkmelin

Depends on D115828

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/b1be1b24e877
Include mailing list address count in many public recipients warning. r=mkmelin