384331 - Implement "All attachments" view (grid-style: filename/type/date/size/from) to folder pane views [explorer-style list with attachment details]

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[u281333]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0...

Email clients are becoming more and more the main "window" to our daily work. At the same time, emails are no more just messages but are containers for "shared information" i.e. document, pictures, addresses, TODOs...

Hence innovative Thunderbird should provide such a view to orthogonal infosets such as those mentioned above: for example (and mainly) a view for attachments (alias documents) ordered by type, date, size ... whatever. 
Typical scenario for the document/attachment-view is finding the latest version of the "via-email-shared-and-edited" powerpoint (sorry OpenOffice) document.

More ideas to be derived from that example: a phone# view, a vcard view, a

This could greatly improve usability for users as well as leverage Thunderbird to become a real "office" tool.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[u281333]

Attachment: Fake Screenshot how it may look like ...

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I truly love this idea, it would be great if we could explore the details of a possible UI for this.
- It's very similar to the custom view "Has attachments"
- but it's much more useful as we'd only be showing the attachments and their details in the main message pane.
- we're using the existing grid seamlessly in an explorer-style details view
- We could then show a quicksearch option to search attachment file names,
- or even fulltext search for attachment files we can handle.
- Message preview pane could show a preview of files we can handle.
Wow, this is exciting to play with.

Bug 360647 has a similar request, probably easier to do, where the grid with the file details is shown messagewise inside the attachment pane (more like a different view mode for the current attachment pane).

There's a number of bugs requesting more detailed information about attachments, both received and when composing.

Comment 3

[u281333]

The difference between this and Bug 360647 (and siblings) is that this proposal suggests having a view for all possible attachments whereas 360647 limits itself to the context of a given message.

I agree that 360647 is long due, but also believe this is more about improving the current user experience (i.e. is indeed more comfortable) ...

... whereas the proposal here would (I firmly believe) increase the work efficiency, hence let TB address enterprise use cases: 

1. the main use case (at least in the case of attachments) coming from every days life: How many times multiple version of given documents are exchanged via email where senders basically just increment the version number or put their name or add a date in the attachment's file name. Being able to list all documents across all message would 

2. the second use case being: search for some documents that where exchanged quiet a while ago (today: you have almost no chance to address this with TB)

3. a positive side effect: it makes TB looks like a shared storage :-) which makes TB yet more attractive ...

... attachments being just one aspect ... addressing all possible infosets would be target.

Comment 5

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

I'm working on an add-on to do this (warning: at the time of this writing, it is extremely WIP): <https://bitbucket.org/squib/attachment-tab>.

Comment 6

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

Here's the add-on, which is currently in beta and awaiting preliminary review: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/attachment-tree/