326558 - add visual cue in recipient column when message has more than one recipient

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

add visual cue in recipient column when message has more than one recipient and name(s) exceed width of the column

for example:  mynam..+  instead of mynam...

names typically exceed the column width, so it's not possible to determine by visually scanning the message index whether a message is addressed to multiple people.

Comment 1

[:aceman]

Should this happen also if no recipient was hidden?
E.g. Aaaaaa,Bbbbbb -> Aaaaaa,Bbbb..+?

Or only if someone was hidden:
E.g. Aaaaaa,Bbbbbb,Cccccc -> Aaaaaa,Bbbb...+ but Aaaaa,Bbbbbb,Cc...

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #1)
> Should this happen also if no recipient was hidden?
> E.g. Aaaaaa,Bbbbbb -> Aaaaaa,Bbbb..+?

I think not, because the plus indicates hidden recipients (here:none, so no plus required), whereas the dots indicate omision of (partial) name.

> Or only if someone was hidden:
> E.g. Aaaaaa,Bbbbbb,Cccccc -> Aaaaaa,Bbbb...+ but Aaaaa,Bbbbbb,Cc...

Yeah, that makes more sense to me.
I could even imagine the following:

Aaaaaa,Bbbbbb,Ccccc,Dddddd -> Aaaaaa,Bbbb..+2
...where +2 indicates the number of recipients that are completely hidden.
We already have similar algorithm for message reader's more button.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

This bug will be more relevant after pending fix for related bug 522886 when recipients column will actually show all recipients (TO, CC, BCC), not just TO-recipients.

Comment 4

[:aceman]

This is quite hard as it would need to detect how exactly the recipients string is rendered (hoe many pixels long) and at which pixel the column cut it off. The ellipsis (...) is automatically added by the column widget. But this '+' would be completelly different.

Neil, what do you think?

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

I can't see a reasonable way to implement this with our current tree code. Perhaps we could put the number of recipients in brackets before the list though, e.g.
Recipients
user@domain.i...
[e-mail]
(2) user@exam...