284648 - Address field icons should actually mean something

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I have some suggestions for making the icons in the addressing fields more 
useful:

1) Only show an address card icon for To, CC and BCC headers.  Design another 
set of icons to be used when the header is (a) Reply-To, (b) Newsgroup/
Followup-To and (c) yet another for custom headers.

2) For the To, CC and BCC headers: modify the icon based on the HTML/Plain 
setting in the recipient's address-book entry.  As an example: use a colored 
icon for HTML, a black & white icon for Plain, and an icon split by a question 
mark (color on one side, b&w on the other) for Unknown recipients.  This would 
give 

3) Double-clicking on an address icon would open the address book card for the 
recipient -- in this way, the received-type preference for the recipient could 
be edited on the fly, which (with the visual coding) now becomes the most likely 
action that someone would want to do on an individual.  If the recipient does 
not exist, it could prefill a new card with the information; and if empty, it 
could open a new, blank address card -- or maybe the addressing window as 
described in bug 252665.

4) Right-clicking on an address icon could present a menu such as:
  Open address card        <- bold/default action
  Remove entry             <- (xref bug 143147)
  ----
  Open addressing window   <- (xref bug 252665)
  ----
  To:                      <- these allow changing the address type without
  CC:                         having to navigate the other header types in the
  BCC:                        dropdown to the left of the field

The color-coding is only really useful for HTML compose windows, but there is no 
particular reason to suppress it for plain-text windows.


Per bug 195941, the icon could also reflect whether the recipient has a 
certificiate (?) -- maybe this would be part of the Enigmail extension.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1) Only show an address card icon for To, CC and BCC headers.  Design another 
> set of icons to be used when the header is (a) Reply-To, (b) Newsgroup/
> Followup-To and (c) yet another for custom headers.

Also a special icon for Mailing List (bug 313476).


> 2) For the To, CC and BCC headers: modify the icon based on the HTML/Plain 
> setting in the recipient's address-book entry.  As an example: use a colored 
> icon for HTML, a black & white icon for Plain, and an icon split by a
> question mark (color on one side, b&w on the other) for Unknown recipients. 
> This would give 
... an indication of whether the message might be converted from HTML to plain.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Obsolete with version 78 and newer.