274953 - In Account folders, allow to show links to emails stored in different folders

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[P.L. Nelson]

The last time I made a suggestion for an enhancement to browser writers was
about 11 years ago in '93 when I emailed Eric Bina and Mark Andreessen about
their newly released Mosaic.  After all, they were just down the street at the
NCSA building here in Urbana, and I had spoken with Eric at an interview I had
with them, so surely they would take my advice.  And they did!

The suggestion was to improve the way they handled "hot picks" (now called 
bookmarks) from a flat name space to a hierarchical arrangement with folders and
subfolders.  They replied with a "thank you" and a promise to consider it for a
future release.  Well, the next major release of Mosaic had the hierarchical
arrangement for "hot picks", and boy did it ever improve the organization of
those rapidly increasing number of web pages to store and keep track of.

Now the time has come to suggest another improvement to your wonderful mozilla
suite and its various components, which I feel will save users quite a bit
of file storage space - I know it will for me!

Like any self-respecting sys/net admin, I save all outgoing email (the CYA
philosophy) and a good deal of incoming as well.  And after 20 years of
emailing, several gigabytes-and-growing of email storage can be a bit daunting.
What I do (and I'm sure others do as well) when saving a piece of email that
could possibly be saved in a number of folders (for example a group discussion
and you have a separate folder for everone cc'd on the email), it would be nice
to just save the physical file once in one folder and make links to it in all
the other folders.  This would be especially nice if the email has a
multi-megabyte attachment, as are peoples' wont these days, it seems.

Now, we are all familiar with the choice box when right-clicking on an email 
in the email header box - one gets (among other choices) the ability to:

      Move TO
      Copy To
      Label
      Mark

I'm suggesting a new category, namely: "Make Link To" so that you could move
the file to one folder (with the Move To) and then make links to it (with the
Make Link To) in all the other folders where you wish to have a reference to it.

Thanks, and am looking forward to this in an upcoming release!

Sincerely,
P.L. Nelson

P. L. Nelson (217-244-9855)    | Systems/Network Administrator
461 Loomis Lab                 | U of I, CITES Departmental Services
1110 W. Green St., Urbana, IL  | Consultant to: High Energy Physics Group
MailTo:[e-mail]        | http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/lnelson
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 "Information without accountability is just noise."  - P.L. Nelson

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.

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 2

[P.L. Nelson]

I do believe the "additional comments" I just received by email about this
suggested improvement (NOT A BUG) implies that it was handled automatically
and no one has actually read this.  It reads like a standard response, clicked
on and posted from a standard set of replies when certain conditions arise,
with no one ever having bothered to think it over and comment on it.  Where
are the developers?  Even a civil response about it not being workable would
be nice, not to mention, curteous.  If it's silly and totally undoable, say so!

This is NOT a bug report but rather a suggested improvement.  If there is some
other mechanism for suggesting improvements then please let me know and I will
submit via that route.

Comment 3

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

helpwanted, trunk

Comment 4

[Kent James (:rkent)]

Isn't this functionality the purpose of allowing multiple tags on folders? Rather than helpwanted, I might suggest we dupe it to the (now complete) implementation of message tags, bug 114656

Comment 5

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

- Comment #0 is so verbose I don't understand what it is about. Please use a _recent_ build, and describe clearly:
    - Steps to Reproduce (1. 2. 3. etc.)
    - Actual Results
    - Expected (or Desired) Results

- In reply to comment #2:
At Mozilla, requests for enhancements and bug reports are handled the same way, in a single database, but they are still subtly kept apart: Notice the "Severity" entry at top? "enhancement" is its lowest possible value.

Reporter (P.L.Nelson): if current builds of SeaMonkey already behave the way you want, then you can RESOLVE the bug (well, the RFE) as WORKSFORME.

Comment 6

[Rainer Bielefeld]

I think reporter wants some thing like:

In  "Sent" folder of Account "[e-mail]" there is a particular e-mail "Dinner Invitation"
User wants to be able to create a copy 
for "Sent" folder of Account "[e-mail]" of particular 
e-mail "Dinner Invitation", but the copy should not contain the complete e-mail, but only a link to e-mail "Dinner Invitation" in "Sent" folder of Account "[e-mail]".

Nothing SeaMonkey-specific, will not be solved "SM only". So I change Product to Thunderbird. May be even some Core component would be more appropriate.

this is not a trivial problem. How will folder search handle such linked emails?