226054 - support for mail-news gatway x-to and x-cc news headers

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: MIME, enhancement)

Description

[Aamer Akhter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/103u (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/100
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031027 Thunderbird/0.4a

I realize that this is a bit of an isolated probelm. But I would appreciate any ideas.

We have an internal mail-news gateway where many mailing lists are converted to newsgroups and 
vice-versa. When people crosspost to the mailing lists the crossposting is not reflected on the 
newsgroup side.

For example, an email with to: x,y will not generate a news message with
newsgroups news.x,news.y. There will be two messages in both news.x and news.y that do not 
mention the cross posting at all. The bad thing about this is that when people respond via news, 
the response is limited to the newsgroup they happened to respond to.

There is a header inserted in the news message:

X-To: x,y

Note that this is just a copy from the To: and CC: fields in the original email message. So the 
crosspost information is actually present in the news message, it's just not used, besides being in a 
different format.

Part of the problem is that the mailing list names and newsgroup names have to relationship. 
There really isn't a way to parse news.x and arrive at x.

I think one solution for this problem would be to CC all the entries in the X-To: field in the news 
response composition. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Aamer Akhter]

Attachment: x-to and x-cc expanded header display

this patch adds the capability to display x-to and x-cc in the expanded display
via the pref mailnews.headers.showXto

Comment 2

[Aamer Akhter]

the xto.patch on 2003-11-17 22:51:53 only displays the x-to and x-cc headers in the expanded 
header view when the pref mailnews.headers.showXto is set.

Still to do is populate the contents of x-to and x-cc into the compose window (when reply all is 
hit). I'm having trouble finding the code that actually sets the params for nsMsgComposeService::
OpenWindow, and would appreciate pointers or help.

Comment 3

[Olivier Cahagne]

No dupes -> marking NEW.
CC'ing Scott (please remove self from CC if I abused this CC capability :)

Comment 4

[Aamer Akhter]

Attachment: x-to expanded header display and compose CC copy

this patch includes the x-to and x-cc diplay functionality as well the copying
the contents of x-to and x-cc to the CC field and removing the newsgroup filed
in teh compose message

Comment 5

[Aamer Akhter]

the patches seem to be working fine for me for a while now. how do i go about getting them code-
reviewed and integrated into proper mailnews?

Comment 6

[Olivier Cahagne]

Aamer, check the review/superreview question mark in your patch.
Potential reviewer: [e-mail], superreviewer: [e-mail]
See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/flag-help.html
It (probably) won't get checked in for 1.6 but as soon as trunk opens for 1.7a,
it should (if it gets r/sr+).

Comment 7

[David :Bienvenu]

the patch looks reasonable at first glance.

Comment 8

[Olivier Cahagne]

Comment on attachment 136055 [details] [diff] [review]
x-to expanded header display and compose CC copy

unsetting approval 1.6 flag as 1.6 is feature freeze, this patch will be for
1.7a trunk when it opens.

Comment 9

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 136055 [details] [diff] [review]
x-to expanded header display and compose CC copy

I'm not particularly keen in adding these headers to the UI when we aren't going to even show them unless you set a hidden pref.

This seems like something best served as an extension. In fact Karsten already has an extension for Thunderbird that lets you set arbitrary headers to see in the message pane so you can use that to get what you want quite nicely.

Comment 10

[Aamer Akhter]

Please keep in mind that the purpose of the patch was to copy the contents of the x-to and x-cc fields into the new message's CC field when 'Reply-All' is hit.

Unfortunatley, I don't know if extensions can do this.

Comment 11

[(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 12

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 13

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

clarkbw an item for post 3.1 thinking. or sooner if you are bored
comment 9 & 10

Comment 14

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 136055 [details] [diff] [review]
x-to expanded header display and compose CC copy

sorry for the delay - this has bit-rotted pretty completely. This still feels like something an extension might want to do, though it may also fit in with our desire to deal with newsgroups displayed as mail messages better.