363948 - "Click Here to Always Load Remote Images" always opens New Card dialog to show images - provide "don't prompt in future"option

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Richard Nott]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 2 beta 1 (20061206)

After receiving email with remote images, clicking on the "click here to always load remote images from <sender>" opens a "New Card for <sender>" address book dialog.  The "Show Images" button in Thunderbird 1.5 worked without issue (and continues to work without problem on the same email).

Reproducible: Always




It may not be an important detail but emails that I've experienced this problem are 'bulk' emails, with many recipients where the 'from' address is different from the 'reply-to' address.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #0)
> After receiving email with remote images, clicking on the "click here to
> always load remote images from <sender>" opens a "New Card for <sender>"
> address book dialog.  The "Show Images" button in Thunderbird 1.5 worked
> without issue (and continues to work without problem on the same email).

This is because the feature has changed -- it no longer whitelists remote content on the address book, but on the individual sender.  The address card is only shown in the case of a new card being created; if the card already exists, the change is made without showing the card.

Allowing images on a specific message continues to work as it has in the past.


> It may not be an important detail but emails that I've experienced this
> problem are 'bulk' emails, with many recipients where the 'from' address is
> different from the 'reply-to' address.

It should be the same regardless of Reply-to -- AFAIK, the whitelisting is applied to the From (and always has been).

Comment 2

[Richard Nott]

If I understand correctly, than I have only a brief comment:

This behaviour is unintuitive to the end-user.  As an end-user, I anticipate "white listing" of particular senders to occur without the need for me to create an address book entry for them (or to be prompted to do so).  In fact, for convenience, I would rather not have to create an entry for white listed senders (particularly when they are mailing lists).  I'd rather have the whitelist entries appear somewhere separate from my address book.  I do recognize, however, that this is a personal - subjective preference.

(In reply to comment #1)
> -snip-
> 
> This is because the feature has changed -- it no longer whitelists remote
> content on the address book, but on the individual sender.  The address card is
> only shown in the case of a new card being created; if the card already exists,
> the change is made without showing the card.
> 
> Allowing images on a specific message continues to work as it has in the past.
> 

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

*** Bug 363856 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #2)
> This behaviour is unintuitive to the end-user.  As an end-user, I anticipate
> "white listing" of particular senders to occur without the need for me to
> create an address book entry for them (or to be prompted to do so).  

But your original complaint was, essentially, "It doesn't work like TB 1.5 did" -- and that version *also* relies on an address-book entry for the way it did whitelisting.


> In fact,
> for convenience, I would rather not have to create an entry for white listed
> senders (particularly when they are mailing lists).  I'd rather have the
> whitelist entries appear somewhere separate from my address book.  I do
> recognize, however, that this is a personal - subjective preference.

In fact, this new feature allows slightly better control, in that you can now create an AB just for your mailing lists, and still whitelist them if desired.
I think creating two listing mechanisms, one for a whitelist and the other for an address book, is a bad idea.

What is needed going forward is better control over which ABs are used for autocompletion (currently either *all* local ABs or none), and which ABs are used for junk whitelisting (currently limited to one).

I've overridden Magnus's duplication, but the comments at that other bug might also be of interest.

Comment 5

[Richard Nott]

Sorry for the delay in response.

In TB 1.5, I do not ever recall having to create an AB listing after clicking on the "Show Images" button.  I assume that this was done automatically, without user intervention.  I didn't even know that it occurred, so I was not actually asking for the functionality to revert to TB 1.5

To clear up some confusion, what I think I'm struggling with is the fact that I click on "Click Here to Always..." and I get a dialog box which, not knowing the details of how the whitelisting works, is completely confusing to me.  I do not, as a user, expect a dialog for an AB entry after clicking to view images.  All I expect is to view the images.  

So, what may be helpful is a simple dialog that says "to show images, TB needs to create an Address Book Entry for <sender>" with an OK button.  Having read that message and clicked OK, I would then not be surprised when an AB dialog box opens.  It would become much more intuitive / clear to the user.

My $0.02.  Hope I'm not being too pedantic - just trying to help.

(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > This behaviour is unintuitive to the end-user.  As an end-user, I anticipate
> > "white listing" of particular senders to occur without the need for me to
> > create an address book entry for them (or to be prompted to do so).  
> 
> But your original complaint was, essentially, "It doesn't work like TB 1.5 did"
> -- and that version *also* relies on an address-book entry for the way it did
> whitelisting.
> 
> 
> > In fact,
> > for convenience, I would rather not have to create an entry for white listed
> > senders (particularly when they are mailing lists).  I'd rather have the
> > whitelist entries appear somewhere separate from my address book.  I do
> > recognize, however, that this is a personal - subjective preference.
> 
> In fact, this new feature allows slightly better control, in that you can now
> create an AB just for your mailing lists, and still whitelist them if desired.
> I think creating two listing mechanisms, one for a whitelist and the other for
> an address book, is a bad idea.
> 
> What is needed going forward is better control over which ABs are used for
> autocompletion (currently either *all* local ABs or none), and which ABs are
> used for junk whitelisting (currently limited to one).
> 
> I've overridden Magnus's duplication, but the comments at that other bug might
> also be of interest.
> 

Comment 6

[Scott Morris]

I agree the functionality for users not in your address book is confusing which led me here since I thought it was a bug. It should work like Gmail does IMO.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I agree, today i clicked on "load remote images for this sender" and the  new card dialog pop up... i closed and retried, pop up... third time... then i came here to search if someone has posted the BUG, because i was thinking that was a bug...

If this is a feature it's totally user UNfriendly, there should be a whitelist separated from address book for commercial addresses... 
for example, if i receive a commercial e-mail on a prize giveway or an offer and i want to see the images for all their offers, why have i to add them to an address book? probably their address cannot even receive mails

btw, is Bug 363856 a dupe of this?

Comment 8

[Colleen Beamer]

This apparently covers my "beef".  I get a fair bit of marketing e-mail and newsletters by choice and if I always want to load images from a particular sender, I click on "Always load remote images" and the address gets added to my address book.  This wouldn't be so bad if it was added to a "Collected Addresses", but it gets added to my Personal address book.  Since most of these addresses are ones that can not be replied to, it is pointless to add them to a Personal address book.  This makes the address book huge because of all the c **** in it.  I realize that I can just click on "Load remote images", but I don't want to have to do this every time I received an e-mail from Tiger Direct or Best Buy.  This is the first time I've ever thought a Thunderbird feature "truly sucked".

I'm using Gentoo Linux with Thunderbird 2.0.0.6.

Regards,

Colleen

Comment 9

[Joshua Nixon]

Thunderbird needs one of two things: Either (a) ability to specify whether entries for a specific address book will be used to autocomplete, or (b) a separate whitelist for commercial email.

I think the best option would be an address book specifically for so-called "ham" email. Call it something like "Trusted Addresses" or something. Disable autocomplete for addresses in this book, and default to add address cards to this book when a user clicks "Always load images from..."

Instead of an address card popup, it would be better to have a confirmation dialog that asks "Add [sender] to Trusted Addresses list?" or some such.

This would allow users to easily whitelist bulk addresses, while retaining the ability to quickly remove whitelisted addresses in an address book. It would also remove the confusion generated by the address card popup. I should not need to file a card for pay_my_bill@some_service.com just to ensure that this sort of thing makes it into my inbox.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Privacy_basics_(Thunderbird) describes current setup

Comment 11

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Ok, cleaning up the flags here.  I want to fix this for TB3.

Like I said in  Bug 363856 Comment #8 I don't think that the address book and list of addresses allowed to send remote images are the same thing.  So I've created bug 457296 to track a new possible change of having a separate list of addresses from the address book; thus eliminating this bug.

Comment 12

[DP]

I agree with you 100% Bryan.  Allowing remote images load is not same as "add this person" to my address book.  That list should be maintained separately.

Comment 13

[klonos]

I vote for this one too. We need some UI to have white/black list that also supports wildcards and/or regex (to allow/block whole domains for example).

Comment 14

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Mark has a work in progress patch on bug 457296, so I'm not sure what to do with this bug.  Once the separate remote list is committed this should be fixed by the fact that a new AB card isn't created and thus no dialog.  I'll put this as depending on the other bug.

Comment 16

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Remote images aren't in ab anymore now that bug 457296 landed -> WFM