280606 - need some way to indicate sent messages (status = Sent)

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, enhancement)

Description

[Michael Newton]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-CA; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: version 1.0 (20041206)

Either change the message display like Eudora does (with italics) or use the
'Status' column (which is much more useful.)  Obviously messages that are sent
are read, so having 'Read' in the column is redundant.  I am switching from
Eudora, and am used to having sent and received messages in the same folder,
which Thunderbird is not friendly to!

Ideally what I'd like to see is the Sender/Recipient columns merged into a 'Who'
column like Eudora's, but suggesting such a thing would probably cause a
religious war :)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Good idea.

Comment 2

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

I also want sent/received indicator because my mobile phone(PHS) has this
capability from my initial use of the mobile phone.

Just an idea, based on idea by bug reporter and my wants.
(1) Introduce X-Mozilla-Status-3 header(Don't touch X-Mozilla-Status/Status-2)
    X-Mozilla-Status-3: S0 S1 S2 ......
      Sn = Hexa notation of a byte
      S0    bit 0   :  0=mail,     1=not mail(draft,template,...)
            bit 1   :  0=Received, 1=Sent     (when bit 0=0)
                       0=Draft,    1=Template (when bit 1=1) 
                       (00:Received mail,01:Sent mail,10:Draft,11=Template)
            bit 2-7 :  Reserved for future use
      S1-Sn         :  Reserved for future use
    Should be removed when sent to SMTP server, or mail composing(Reply/Foward)  
    on both "inline forward" & "attachment forward".
(2) Add new column "Who" in mail list pane(thread pane)
    In any folder, display "From:" if S0 bit 0/1=00, otherwise display "To:".
(3) Add new "Status" column for Received/Sent etc. indicator
    (like "Has attachment icon")
    Coloring/shadowing/bolding etc. is also appreciated. 
(4) Received/Sent etc. indicator in mail header box in mail pane(preview pane)
(5) Message filter should support above flags in both "Filter condition"
    and "Filter action".
    Change capabilty is required to categorize old mails.
(6) View enhancement - View/sent, View/received, View/draft, View/template
(7) New header recognition on ".msf" recreation.
    If above information is also kept in ".msf"(for efficiency),
    information should be recovered on ".msf" recreation.
(8) X-Mozilla-Status-3: header generation on import
(9) X-Mozilla-Status-3: should be changed to "Draft"/"Template"
    when moved/copied to Drafts/Template folder respectively.
    X-Mozilla-Status-3: should NOT be changed
    when moved/copied from Drafts/Template folder respectively
    to other normal folder.

If POP3, aboves have no problem.
But how about IMAP? Performance problem/compatibility problem may arise.

Comment 3

[Michael Newton]

I think messages are already being marked as sent, using a value of 0x00800000
in X-Mozilla-Status2.  It's not the documented use (which involves message
delivery notifications,) but it looks like that's what's happening from my
investigations.  Or am I mistaken?

Comment 5

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

> http://www.eyrich-net.org/mozilla/X-Mozilla-Status.html?en
> X-Mozilla-Status2
> Name                     Value      Description
> MSG_FLAG_MDN_REPORT_SENT 0x00800000 An MDN report message has been sent for this message.
>                                     No more MDN report should be sent to the sender.

Comment 7

[Sol]

This bug goes back 16 years. There is a similar bug report 280606 from several years ago. I submitted a related bug 1661788 to this one today. Any way to move this forward? I would think adding another status category would be easy. What's the hold up?

Comment 8

[Andre Klapper]

Feel free to write a patch. Nobody having volunteered yet to work on this is the hold up.

Comment 9

[Sol]

Andre, I'm not a programmer, so don't have the skill set to fix this. But the source code has the existing status codes, such as Read and Replied. It would seem a trivial task to add Sent to those choices as a first step, to allow users to manually assign that status to sent messages. The next step would be to optionally have that status automatically assigned to sent messages, which is more complex, but again, the source code that adds status to Read and Replied exists, and changing the status from Read to Sent on sent messages, while not trivial, is not rocket science. This request has been requested for 16 years by many people, and is a standard feature of all other email clients I've used - it is essential. If someone wants to be paid to do this, name a reasonable price, and I'll consider if I can afford to pay it.