257713 - On-the-fly Identity editing / creation (Envelope-To: / disposable email address handling)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, enhancement)

Description

[Lorrin Nelson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.9.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.9.1

Feature request:

I often used disposable email addresses when submitting web forms or lurking on
mailing lists. Occasionally I need to send messages from those identities (e.g.
to confirm a subscription request or respond to a message). It's a pain to have
to create a new identity just to write a single message.

It would be nice if Thunderbird supported one or more of the following:

1) Ability when writing a message to manually edit the From: field on-the-fly
w/out creating an identity. Benefit: I can create a temporary mail account on my
server and then easily send a message from it in Thunderbird. Also I can,
without too much hassle, reply to messages received for this address.

2) Ability when writing a message to hit a button and have the From: field be
set to the value of a certain header (E.g. Envelope-To:) of the message being
replied to. Benefit: very easy to reply to messages received for temporary address.

3) Ability to have the above automatically happen always or when certain
criteria are met (e.g. for a certain account or if Envelope-To: matches a
pattern). Benefit: ultimate no-user-intervention approach for responding from
temporary address.

4) Dynamic identity generation. E.g. set something like "when I receive a
message for foo*@domain.org automaticallly create a new identity within account
x for that email address". I realize Thunderbird can't always know for sure who
the message was received for. In this case do nothing. Benefit: alternate
implementation of ultimate no-user-intervention approach.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Reporter, please file only 1 bug or enhancement request per report. Otherwise we
can't assign this to the correct engineer.

item 1 is bug 87987 (for Seamonkey)

Comment 2

[Lorrin Nelson]

They're all solutions to the same problem. Wouldn't it make more sense to track
them as a group and have the Mozilla team decide which solution to implement?

Comment 3

[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 4

[Lorrin Nelson]

Keeping bug alive; I think it's still a valuable feature. Perhaps "Virtual Identity" extension should be 
integrated into main codeline.

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=594&application=thunderbird

Comment 6

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Reporter, please file only 1 bug or enhancement request per report. Otherwise
> we can't assign this to the correct engineer.

So true. Please file new bugs for each of the request.

--> INVALID

Comment 7

[Lorrin Nelson]

Wow, this is a really goofy process. This is a *single* feature request. Let me rephrase it:

At message compose-time it should be possible to use a From: address which has not been pre-configured.

My original request brainstormed various ALTERNATE ways of designing the solution. I'd hate to imagine that if I filed four different feature requests they'd all get implemented! Anyway, as mentioned in #4, Virtual Identity addresses this satisfactorily so it's fine by me if Thunderbird can't handle it natively.