367586 - Select default outgoing server per-contact via Address Book

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Steve Sutton]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/2007-01-19-18-thunderbird2.0b2-l10n/thunderbird-2.0b2.en-GB.win32.installer.exe

This is a feature request, not a bug report.

My employer's network is set up such that emails to internal/local addresses have to go to one outgoing/SMTP server, and external emails go to another (I also use further separate SMTP servers for testing email processing software).

The problems with this are:-

A) I frequently make the mistake of sending the wrong server/account and don't hear about it until I get a bounce, which could be some time later
B) I am unable to send a single email to internal and external addresses at the same time.

I would very much like to be able to specify a default outgoing server on a user by user basis in the address book so that TB will automatically select the outgoing server on a per recipient basis.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create two contacts which require separate outgoing SMTP server
2. Send a message to both
or
3. Send a message to a contact using the wrong outgoing SMTP server
Actual Results:  
One of the messages will bounce...but I won't necessarily know about it for a while.
or
The message will bounce...but I won't necessarily know about it for a while.

Expected Results:  
Both messages delivered via separate outgoing servers
or
Message automatically sent via the correct outgoing server for that address

There is nothing unusual about my configuration, except the two server mail system implemented by my employer.

Comment 1

[Steve Sutton]

I'm tempted to upgrade this to a "normal" bug, since (A) above could be interpreted as a user interface failure.  Comments on this would be welcome.

Comment 3

[Codain]

As I'm interested in such feature and it seems that i'm not alone I propose to move this enhancement request to NEW in order for someone to implement it.

A dropdown list can be added to contacts in order to select either "Default" or a given account.

I think that such personnal field should be ignored during export and import.