282303 - Build active (community based) support for Template driven email creation and emoticons

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Thomas Zillinger]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-DE; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-DE; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

The basic idea is to be able to send nicely designed emails based on templates 
and Emoticons like it is already used a lot for example in IncrediMail.
Support should include

.) Possibility to maintain templates (like Extensions, plugins) and emoticons 
   and download them from the web (update.mozilla.org) in Thunderbird
.) Create the framework for a community driven website on update.mozilla.org,
like it is already used for extenstion, plugins.
   -) Download & upload mail templates (single ones or sets) and emoticons 
      packages from the web (update.mozilla.org) 
   -) Have screenshots, forum aso. as we have them in update (beta) and 
      mozdev.org

I think adding this feature will greatly improve acceptance for people who just
want to send nicly designed mails or just a greeting cards. 
Most of the normal users, are not very much into design and have not a large
collection of wallpapers, images on their harddrive from which they can choose
of and where the can play with in putting everything together in the mail
composer. Designing such mails normally takes a lot of time for them (me :)).
Having predefined mail templates created by a community that is willing to
design templates for thunderbird will make this much easier and also much more
enjoyable
since they most possibly will look a lot better :)

I think this enhancement should not be downgraded to just be a plugin which
should be created by somebody some day, but should really be encouraged and
actively supported by the mozilla.org itself. 

Many thanks for your work on thunderbird and mozilla so far
Thomas Zillinger

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Reporter, there is already support for templates in Thunderbird, although there
are many ways to improve it (bug 178263, bug 21210, bug 95284, ...). Are you
talking about a central website where users can download predefined templates
('greeting card' style) ?

Comment 2

[Thomas Zillinger]

> Are you talking about a central website...

This is exactly the general idea behind it. As i mentioned above, there chould
be support in thunderbird to allow installation of templates and emtoiconpacks,
which plug into thunderbird seemlessly. 

From the website's point of view you would be able to view all
templates/emoticons from screenshots and install them, as it is already
implemented with 'themes'. 

From thunderbird's point of view you would have the template manager and
emoticons manager which could function the exact same way as the
themes/extensions manager to add or remove packages.

I could even think of a way to use _only_ thunderbird to install/view templates
from the web without opening the webbrowser, using webservices or other
technologies, which would be ideal for this purpose. But this would blow up
basic support for a starter too much....

I suspect that on the development point of view this would more or less be just
a copy and paste for the website management and to the thunderbird
implementation, since all components seem already to be available. 

Comment 3

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 283202 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[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
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Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.