255517 - Show In-Reply-To: and/or References: headers in compose window

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Scott Lamb]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.8
Build Identifier: 

Symptom:

On mailing lists, I frequently see new threads appear as part of older ones. If the old thread is not one 
I'm interested in, I'm often in danger of missing the new thread.

Cause:

New users don't realize that replies contain In-Reply-To: and References: headers. They find it 
convenient to compose new messages to mailing lists by replying to old ones and stripping out the 
subject and quoted body text, rather than entering the mailing list address into a new message. 
(Presumably they don't know about clicking on the To: address and "Compose Mail To".)

And really...how would they know about these headers? There is no visual indication that they exist.

Solution:

Indicate in the UI that a message is in reply to another one, so a reply-then-stripped message looks 
different than a fresh one composed to the same address.

I'm not picky about how this appears. Perhaps actually putting in the References: and In-Reply-To: 
headers verbatim. Perhaps an uneditable bar at the top of the compose window that says "In reply to 
message <SUBJECT> on <DATE> from <PERSON>".

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[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.

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Comment 2

[Jack Eidsness]

I can confirm this is still the behavior, and it would be a great feature that
would be imitated in other mail clients.  It's been years and years that people
throughout the internet have been unaware of how email threading works, because
of UI's that don't have any interest in telling them what is happening.

I think the display in compose window should have a delete button next to it, to
strike the in-reply-to or references;  Usually someone just wants to re-use an
address list in the easiest possible way, and they don't know or don't care
about those fields.

Comment 3

[Ronald Killmer]

Reference Headers were made available for viewing in Headers=All view option as elements of Expanded headers bar.

Nominate this bug being closed as result of GSC2007 work.

Added CC: [e-mail]

Comment 4

[Jack Eidsness]

What is GSC2007?  I searched mozilla.org, mozilla.com, mozillazine, and google.
I haven't seen anything new in shredder that fits this RFE.  I don't use thunderbird for news so I can't see what you're saying about References, but "In-Reply-To" is definitely still hidden during composition.

Comment 5

[Ronald Killmer]

Google Summer of Code, a grant Mozilla received that funder several internships.

In Shredder there is a Hidden preference to activate the feature for Mail, while it is true by default for News. "mailnews.headers.showReferences"

Bug #62033 - Should display |References| links in message display window
Comments down around 42 pertain to the pref.

Comment 6

[Jack Eidsness]

Well, a hidden preference clearly doesn't address the problem ("no one understands threading because the information is hidden from them").  Anyone who knows why he wants it would not want it.

Comment 7

[Ronald Killmer]

The referenced bug dealt with adding the display of the references in the Expanded Header Bar and has nothing to do with Thread Pane threading. So my point is, there does exist a feature to make reference info visible when viewing a message.

Comment 8

[Jack Eidsness]

Well, people have always been able to see the headers with ^U, too, but it hasn't ever addressed the problem in a way that makes it obvious to normal end users what is going on.  The problem (if you can call it that) is what people do during composition, and that's why this bug suggests making the hidden information available in the compose window. 

Showing a msgid in compose window would be confusing and basically pointless, but I like the top comment's  "In reply to . . ." suggestion.  I agree that it shouldn't be editable as such (since the text shown is actually just a more descriptive replacement for the msg id that is really in the header), but if it had an "X" to trash the header and prevent thunderbird from marking the replied-to message, that would be the best.  Then all of a sudden, using "reply all" would actually work in a way that is satisfying to everyone involved.

Comment 9

[Glenn Knickerbocker]

A visible option to "X" out the In-reply-to would have been a good solution to bug 726281 as well.

Personally, I'd also like to be able to add or edit these headers--to copy in the missing references from the previous message when someone else has sent an unthreaded reply, or to reply to a message that I've retrieved from, say, a web client and don't have available in Thunderbird.