278198 - 1.8a6 prevents me from forwarding mail to news

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Account Configuration, defect)

Description

[Thommie Rother]

The 1.8a6 version has a new "feature" or warning dialog which blocks the
forwarding from mail to news. It is no longer possible to forward a mail, which
was received on an imap account, into a newsgroup on another account of the same
Mozilla installation/profile.

While there may be technical reasons for that: If this kind of "blocking"
remains in Mozilla and the following Thunderbird versions, it would make these
applications USELESS for larger number of our users here! We use both mail and
news for daily team communication here, users have an imap and a nntp account in
there profiles. Forwarding of mail to news or news to mail and any kind of mixed
mail/news communication (like a news reply which is also cc'ed via mail or a
forward of a news message inta another newsgroup plus cc. to a mail adress) is
absolutely common here. Such kind of blocking would be a MAJOR regression and a
severe loss of functionality for the Moz. Suite and Thunderbird!

I would really recommend you all to re-think this decision. If there are
technical issues for this, we should think about a way to solve these problems.
But please, do NOT just "downsize" such a major fuctionality of
Mozilla/Thunderbird Mail/News!

Bye, Thommie

Comment 1

[Thommie Rother]

Sorry, but I raised the severity again.

Comment 2

[Christian Eyrich]

This "feature" has been intentionally introduced in bug 234186.
The simple solution and correct way is Forward, select News identity and fill
destination group in. Now it sends.

Comment 3

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Also, you may be running into bug 228593 (which Christian might want to push a
bit before his patch is celebrating its first birthday ;-) ).

Comment 4

[Thommie Rother]

Hm, ok, but:
I mark a received IMAP or POP message. On the right mouse click menu, there is
only "Forward". This opens the message in a Compose window. The message is
attached (either inline or attachment) and I can add some text. Same
functionality is shown with the Forward button on top. Then I select "Newsgroup"
as the label for the receipient header and enter the name of the newsgroup.

If I use the menu on top, there is "Message, Forward" (or Ctrl-L) and "Message,
Forward as [Inline], [Attachment]". All of them direct me to the same Compose
window (I also think that, concerning the Forward and Forward as..., options,
one of them is unneccessary from a useability standpoint)  

This is how it worked before, without any problems, from old Netscape 4x times
up to moz. 1.6 (see my previous discussion with David on the problem with "mixed
mail/news headers" in Bug 239982. This bug is still present and I feel it came
up soon after the introduction of "multiple identities"). Never before there was
a need to enter BOTH the newsgroup address AND, simultaneously, manually change
the sender (!) identity from the mail to the news account.

I do understand the discussion in 234186 from the technical point of view. But,
concerning useability, having much more user action steps than before is really
a big, big loss of functionality. We use NNTP newsgroups for our internal
communication here. Our users always need to be able to forward a received mail
to a newsgroup if they want to (but not by accident). Same goes for any kind of
mixed recipients (e.g. sending to a mail adress plus to a newsgroup, both done
with one message composition). 

Therefore I think this is a really critical issue and we need a better solution.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Does the error message tell you that you need to switch identities? Could we
automatically switch the identity based on the newsgroup picked? I.e., find the
news account with that newsgroup and set the identity to the default identity
for that account, iff the current identity isn't associated with that news account?

Comment 6

[Christian Eyrich]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Does the error message tell you that you need to switch identities?

No, it just reads "This account only supports email recipients. Continuing will
ignore newsgroups."

> Could we automatically switch the identity based on the newsgroup picked?
> I.e., find the news account with that newsgroup and set the identity to the
> default identity for that account, iff the current identity isn't associated
> with that news account?

I think we've a bug on that elsewhere.

Comment 7

[Thommie Rother]

Note that the automatic switch to another identity which "fits" is the way how
KMail in KDE handles this.

Comment 8

[Thommie Rother]

Hi,
any news on this issue? What are the next steps? 

I think the functionality to forward mail->news and send messages to "mixed"
recipients needs to be solved/enhanced soon, as described in #5 und #6.
Especially if post-1.8.6 code is merged into the thunderbird 1.1 release
process. From the end user perspective, the current "blocking/info" implemented
through the patch in Bug 234186 would be a fatal loss of useability for users
that use both mail and newsgroup accounts for intensive communication.

Thommie

Comment 9

[Thommie Rother]

Even after a manual switch of the identity (from the newsserver to the imap
server identity), it is NOT possible to forward a message which was received in
a newsgroup to another user via mail. See the error message in attachment.

Comment 10

[Thommie Rother]

Attachment: Error message when trying to forward message through the mail identity

Comment 11

[Thommie Rother]

Attachment: Header lines of the news message which caused the error message

Comment 12

[Nino]

I second the original reporters request:
sending messages to a mail recipient AND newsgroup simultanously is a highly
desired feature also for me. 

btw: why is this bug unconfirmed??? At least it is a RFE resp a 'please don't
regress beyond netscape 4.x' request ;-)

Comment 13

[Nino]

just found a possible solution: an occasionally occuring connection error to
IMAP or news server might be handled with too big delay by the client (more than
2 minutes)? Thommie, can you confirm?

Comment 14

[Nino]

still digging further into this...
part or the problem seems to be sending simultaneously mail & news to servers
requiring identification. this needs technical resolution (as proposed in
comment#5) or will result in slight usability regression when having to send the
same message twice. Nevertheless this should be addressed, because usability for
me is a major point.

The second part of the problem is described in #comment 13: the very delayed
error handling in case of 'inappropriate' (but in older mozilla versions
perfectly working) posting to different servers with different identities. This
should be eliminated ASAP. Eventually a new bug with approp summary should be
opened or the summary should be changed in this bug.

Comment 15

[Zook Valem]

Status --> New

Valid bug report.  Other than that, I'm going to leave the summary unchanged due
to lack of "hard data" on what cause this problem.

Comment 16

[Nino]

Thunderbird 1.0.2:
Making use of the 'mutliple identities' feature allows (at least in my case) the
following workaround (when sending a message simultaneously to newsgroup and
mail recipients: 
0) Compose your mail aimed at heterogenous recipients; set your identity to be
appropriate for the *news* server
1) open the smtp server connection by manually polling for new mails (in my case
sending mails requires pop/imap before smtp)
2) send your mail

Thus, everything seems to go smooth. So from my point of view the appropriate
sequence of 
+ identifying against the mail connection 
+ sending mails 
+ identifying against the news connection 
+ sending news 
+ identifying against the imap connection 
+ storing a copy of sent mails to the sent folder
turns out to be critical problem.

When setting the identity to be appropriate for the mail server in Step 0, the
connection seems to brake often (although not always, but I can't figure out,
when it does and when it does not) and the transaction is not completed - at
least not fully, as sometimes the message *is* sent through one of the channels,
but not through the other.