229568 - Thread view across folders (sent and inbox) in order to overview the complete correspondence

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, enhancement)

Description

[Søren Thing Pedersen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

Often I read through my own mails to catch-up on what I have committed myself
to. However, I have to search through seperate folders (the sent folder and
incoming or an archive folder) and compare mails and date headers in order to
backtrack and restructure the correspondence.

It would be of great value to me if I could view my own sent mails in thread
view and thereby overview the complete correspondence - very much like the way
newsgroups works per default.

I think Outlook may have something to this effect called Discussion View but I
am not sure since I haven't used Outlook in a long time.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Robert Mohr]

I get this by BCC'ing myself automatically (from Account Settings) and using a
filter to mark emails from myself as read.

Comment 2

[Christian Eyrich]

Sorry Søren, I don't get what your problem is. Watching your sent mail and the
mail you responded to in a thread can already be done. The messages only need a
References: header line. Just set Mozilla to place a copy not in the sent folder
but in the one where your incoming mails live or do what Robert wrote.

Or do you want this thread view to work even if sent and received mails are in
different folders?

Comment 3

[Søren Thing Pedersen]

Yes, I would like it to restructure the complete thread across folders because
all my sent mails are in the "sent" folder.

Comment 4

[Christian Eyrich]

Ah, ok. That would be indeed really nice - and a bigger task.

Comment 5

[Bogdan Stroe]

*** Bug 240342 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Max Alekseyev]

dup of bug 11051 ?
I've filled a similar bug 240343 and it was marked as a duplocate of bug 11051

Comment 7

[Dennis Bijwaard]

This accross folder thread view would certainly help me a lot, and not only for
Send and Inbox folders.

I get email in a number of email lists for different tasks in a project and a
lot of crossposting is done. I have setup rules to move the emails from
different email lists to different folders, but frequently the discussion
threads are broken because they continue in another mailbox (e.g. when a email
list is added to the TO or CC which has higher priority in the filter rules).
Btw. I don't like to create rules to copy the crossposted emails to all relevant
folders, some of the messages are quite big, and I'll loose track of what I've
read and what not.

Another use is when your mailbox gets too large and you have to backup part in a
separate folder, in that case threads can also span multiple email folders.

This could be implementated as a method on an email, e.g. which Outlook calls
"Find all -> related messages", and present the result from multiple folders in
a threaded view.

Comment 8

[Alexander]

Thunderbird is able to paint a little green arrow on messages I replied to even
though the replies are in the sent folder. I still cant see my email responses
when viewing a thread, only green arrows. Why is that?

Comment 9

[[e-mail]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Thunderbird is able to paint a little green arrow on messages I replied to even
> though the replies are in the sent folder. I still cant see my email responses
> when viewing a thread, only green arrows. Why is that?
> 
Because what is regquested in this bug is not implemented yet.
As a workaround you can configure your email account so that the sent messages
are placed in the Inbox instead of the sent folder (The "Copies and folders"
section of an account in the account settings). 

Comment 10

[Dave Abrahams]

That doesn't work if you have server-side (or even client-side) rules that are 
sorting incoming messages into other folders... unless you want to put a copy 
of every outgoing message in every folder ;-)

Comment 11

[Alexander]

Are there any changes in Thunderbird 2.0?

Comment 12

[David :Bienvenu]

None relevant to this bug, no.

Comment 13

[Dave Abrahams]

Please see http://www.43folders.com/2008/03/12/patterns-email-conversation#comment-337334

This feature is important to anyone practicing Inbox Zero

Comment 14

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

posted note about comment 13 to m.d.a.thunderbird

corresponding thunderbird bug is Bug 379806 threaded/grouped-by-sort views unavailable in saved searches across multiple folders

Comment 15

[Dave Abrahams]

Everybody go look at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6533 ASAP
It appears to do exactly what I wanted.

Comment 16

[Dominic Amann]

The plug-in does what I need, but it has huge performance problems on my setup. I use IMAP, and keep some 5000 messages across my various folders (highly organized). I do not wish to (or even find desirable) delete or archive old e-mails, I would like this from and reply type threading to work without reducing my system to a crall while it spends 15 minutes indexing all my folders each time I restart Thunderbird.

Comment 18

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #16)
> The plug-in does what I need, but it has huge performance problems on my setup.
> I use IMAP, and keep some 5000 messages across my various folders (highly
> organized). I do not wish to (or even find desirable) delete or archive old
> e-mails, I would like this from and reply type threading to work without
> reducing my system to a crall while it spends 15 minutes indexing all my
> folders each time I restart Thunderbird.

Gloda which is coming to thunderbird 3 will display conversations across folders.  It is built into thunderbird (not an extension) and will be preffed on in the next beta, beta 3. If you are anxious to see this work it would be great to have your assistance in testing. Follow the progress in  Bug 464354 -  [Meta] Pref enable gloda by default tracker

Also in Thunderbird 3, in beta 2 which just shipped, is improved threading within virtual folders/saved searches. Try  http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/  This should also be available in Seamonkey's 2.0 alpha builds