209337 - warning to blind copy (bcc) email recipients

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Steve Petersen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030210
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030210

I recently learned the Mulberry email client adds this line to the top of bcc'd
email:

"IMPORTANT! This message has been blind-carbon-copied to you. Do not
reply-to-all or forward it without the author's permission."

I think this is a clever automatic feature; I've often felt compelled to send a
separate email to bcc recipients reminding them of this fact.  I'd love to see
it as a configurable option (perhaps configurable message, too).

I'm no programmer so can only suggest the feature.  I'm also unfamiliar with
MIME formats and the like, so I'm not sure what kind of problems it might cause.
 I just thought I'd throw the idea out there.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Neat idea, but impossible to implement in an international environment. The
warning-message is in English, but the recipients might not be able to read that
language. I write and receive messages in Dutch, English, French, German and
Spanish daily. How would I use such a feature ? Even ignoring that 70% of the
users don't really understand what blind-carbon-copy really is (it doesn't
exists in my language for example).

I think it would be more useful to have a header that indicates that the message
was bcc'ed (because that's currently impossible to determine), and if you tried
to reply-all on such a message, you should get some kind of warning in the
language of your GUI. So the warning is seen by the person that tries to
reply-all, but not every receiver of the message. But that feature would only
work in Mozilla though ...

Comment 2

[Jim Booth]

Neat idea.  Could be handled with an external file just like SIGNATURES, that
gets added to head of message only to the BCC recipients.

Changing platform to ALL

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

Note solution 1 in bug 219850 comment 1 - maybe a Mozilla client can warn its
user when it detects this empty BCC-field.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 5

[Alan Dobkin]

Just commenting to keep this bug open.  I know ex-Mulberry users would still
like to see this feature implemented.

Comment 6

[Alan Dobkin]

(Replying to my own comment above.)

Upon further review, I have to retract my comment.  I don't think this RFE
should be implemented, i.e. WONTFIX.  I realized that, although this is a great
idea in theory, it was a poor implementation of it as done in Mulberry and
described here.  There is a much better suggestion in bug #295503, which is what
should be implemented instead of this one.

The problem with this implementation is that it inserts a warning message into
the top of the body for BCC recipients, which permanently alters the content of
that message.  The repercussion is that the BCC recipient will then decide to
reply to all or forward this message anyway and forget to remove this warning,
thus making it even more blatantly obvious and possibly embarrasing that this
message was sent as a BCC in the first place, when they may not have even
noticed otherwise.

Please close this bug and instead implement bug #295503.

Comment 7

[Steve Petersen]

I'm amenable to the newer bug instead.

Comment 8

[David :Bienvenu]

ok, marking wontfix