273277 - [meta] thunderbird needs a better templates system

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Tsahi Asher]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; he-IL; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; he-IL; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910

currently the excuse thunderbird (and mozilla mail) have for templates, is a
saved message you can send over and over again. a good template mechanism should
have the following features:

1. when replying with a template, an option to automaticly enter fields from the
original message, such as "from", original text, original subject, etc. in
user-selected places (i.e. not nessesarily enter the original "from" in the "to"
field of the reply).
2. when writing a new message with a template, keep place holders in the message
that will allow entering pre-defined texts.

the strongest templates system i know of is in Pegasus Mail, that i use, but
that could be a little too much for the "light" design of TB. as a start,
something basic like i described will suffice.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

See bug 21210, bug 178263, bug 95284, bug 100467.

Comment 2

[Pierre Couderc]

There is another need very linked to this one, it is the template in a mailto:.
I imagine something like :
mailto://[e-mail]?template="template_name",subject=my_template,from="from",
dyn_param1="specialtemplate param"
This makes sense in an intranet or a report form inside an organisation, but
this is a big use of thunderbird/firefox/mozilla.

Comment 3

[Richard Neal]

Yes, right now if a user opens a template while working then decides to save 
the his/her incomplete email in drafts it deletes the template and saves it in 
drafts. This also happend if the user just closes an incomplete email it moves 
the template to drafts. 
 
What used to happen is "it never removes the templates" on a generic save, the 
fact it saves anything as a draft isnt a big deal, the headache is when they 
have to keep copying the template from drafts back again. 
 
 

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Comment 0 describes nice desiderata of an advanced template system for TB, which however is unlikely to happen any time soon as we've not even come round to replacing the outdated AB component with something new and more appropriate.

In the meantime, I'm firmly convinced that we should at least make the current simple template system operational for basic tasks. Like editing an existing template without first creating a message from the existing template, then save that message as template, potentially creating dozens of temporary templates in the process due to another bug, and then deleting the old template and temporary versions thereof. Jörg and I are currently fixing this shortcoming:

Bug 1389062 - Implement "Edit Template" command and UI

Please note that we have also implemented an explicit default action for templates:

Bug 1389083 - Implement "New Message from Template" command and UI

Just like its ill-assorted predecessor, the "Edit as new message" command, which acted as a stop-gap solution for this default action, "New Message from Template" will strictly observe the format of the template message, not the account preference (between HTML and plaintext compose mode).

"Edit as new message" is still available, but now with a slightly different and much more useful behaviour of respecting your account format preference, NOT the message format, which has fixed long-standing annoyance of bug 78794 where users get stuck in plaintext mode for "Edit as new" of plaintext messages.

The good news being, afasics we're now allowing Shift modifier for *all* composing flavors (hold Shift while clicking), so users can always get their preferred composing mode regardless of message and account format. Here's one of the latest pieces in that puzzle:

Bug 731688 - Shift modifier key is ignored for "Edit Message as New" menu (Shift+Click, Shift+Enter to compose in non-default format: plaintext vs. HTML; message menu, msg context menu)

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Thomas D. from comment #4)

> Bug 1389083 - Implement "New Message from Template" command and UI

For the avoidance of doubt, so far that's a contextual command which is available only when right-clicking on a template message within a Templates folder. As I said, basics first...

Comment 6

[Óvári]

Please add the following bugs to "Depends on":

Enable attaching a Template when creating a message
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1468704

When create email template with attachment, attachment should be include as link.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508731

Thank you