387274 - Solve email clutter generated by confidentiality notices

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Rocco Lucia]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; it; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: New X-header and GUI bindings proposal to ease/handle "Confidentiality Notices"

I'm carbon copying this feature requst from my blog, since it's not mozilla-only related.

We are all "disturbed" by the most naive and fancy or just annoying "Confidentiality Notice", DISCLAIMERS, or whatever people/companies add to their email signatures. That's just pollution, since they won't add any good into email messaging but cluttering our everyday mailing life.

I think most of you already know well the problem so I won't go much in deep explaining this problem.

Well I have a proposal to solv..hmm...circumvent this problem: introduce an X-Disclaimer or X-ConfidentialityNotice header whose value would be an URL pointing to website into the message's From: domain.

For example, the new header would appear like this:

  X-ConfidentialityNotice: http://www.iscanet.com/notices/email.xml


or more simply

  X-ConfidentialityNotice: http://www.iscanet.com/notices/email.html


Now for the feature request: it would be a good thing if mail clients recongnized this header and had some GUI binding, so that somewhere in the message view appeared some sort of button or whatever pointing to (guess what) "Confidentiality Notice", that would retrieve the xml, parse and show it, or simply follow the hyperlink showing the clutter :-)

What would we need to implement this magic?

    * In the account settings, add a text box to add the notice's URL
    * Define and share a DTD in the case we would go for XML
    * some "app logic" to parse XML, and check correspondence between From: domain and X-ConfidentialityNotice domain of the URL.
    * In the message view window add a GUI element (text, smallicon, whatever) on the window border, or statusbar or near the subject, or werever you like. This element would fire up the hyperlink or open a dialog with properly parsed xml.

Having this or some sort of this thing implemented would give us some peace of mind and less clutter into our email.

Since I like this idea, I will be mailing Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla (you) guys to hear what they think.

That's my 5cents.

Rocco

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Receive and display an email with a lenghty confidentiality notice for instant gratif...clutterification ;-)
Actual Results:  
Lenghty, cluttered mail messages.

Expected Results:  
Shorter, more concise, less polluted mail messages.

Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

That's all well and good, but this isn't really the place to start discussion of a new "standard" header in e-mail. At such time as the header becomes fairly widespread, if any additional work is needed on Thunderbird's part to support it (unlikely, considering that such headers are already generally covered by a standard), a bug should be filed then.

INVALID seems to be the best resolution for this, since the bug isn't really in Thunderbird.

Note, for the record, that I would be COMPLETELY in favour of people putting privacy/confidentiality notices somewhere -- anywhere -- other than the body text of e-mails. But Bugzilla isn't the appropriate place to begin or continue that campaign. In fact, you're probably wasting your time telling this to e-mail client vendors. You need to educate the people who use the notices.