353800 - support "Sensitivity" header field (values: personal, private, company confidential) as per RFC 987

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Ralf Hauser]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

see also 

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
Support it under "Compose - Options" like is also done with "Priority".

Quite some mail gateways can provide value-added security services based on this in a user-friendly way!

http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2156.html appears to be even newer!

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

If you're primarily seeking to add a Sensitivity header to mail you send, that capability is already in place.  See this article:
  <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Custom_headers>

Note that there are two different techniques in the first part of that article which are not well differentiated in the text -- the 'other.header' pref gives one behavior, the 'identity.idN.headers' pref gives another.

Comment 2

[Ralf Hauser]

Mike, 

Thanks, these appear to be nice if I wanted to have all my traffic with a header.

But I guess, I cannot expect users to edit user.js for every single message they send or did I overread something.

Thx Ralf

P.S.: Perhaps another plugin could allow to switch on a per composed message basis?

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

You did not read closely enough.  Look again: you can create a header that can be sent on a per-message basis.

Comment 4

[Ralf Hauser]

ok, I was able to create a 
  user_pref("mail.compose.other.header", "Sensitivity");
and that can be selected like another cc address or so.
Also, I was able to enhance the search window fields to have a "Sensitivity".

The following points IMHO are missing until that is really user-friendly.
1) It should be possible to pre-fill the header, but
  user_pref("mail.compose.other.header", "Sensitivity: Company-Confidential");
didn't really work because both the header name and the header value appeared in the left field
2) It should be possible to not only have free text to enter as header value, but to offer a choice such as "Company-Confidential"|"Private"|"Personal"|"Normal"
3) Lastly, it should be possible to have the choice always show and have the user to click-and-select on a white square until s/he sees it

... or did I still overlook something?

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #4)
> ... or did I still overlook something?

No, that's basically as much as the available feature can do.

One thing you can do so that the header is pre-filled is to create a separate identity, and set it up to always sends with the header turned on, like the first thing that you tried.  Then for those messages that you want sent with "company-confidential" you'd simply change the identity to the one using the prefilled header.  

Adding further support as you describe is indeed an enhancement request.  I think you might get results sooner if you wrote an extension to handle this, or got someone to write one for you.