391442 - Custom Colors not Networkable/Shareable with other users (Enhancement)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[James]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070718 Fedora/2.0.0.5-1.fc7 Firefox/2.0.0.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird version 2.0.0.5 (20070719)

My company uses an IMAP server to manage our technical support and sales tickets with our customers. Several Support technicians login to the same account to receive e-mail from our customers, and then mark the e-mails using the color tagging system included in Thunderbird (Red - Important, Work - Yellow, Personal - Green, To-do - Blue , Later - Purple).
Instead of using it for urgency, we actually assigned a color to each of the support technicians to use the tags as ownership of the e-mails. So tech #1 takes red, tech #2 takes yellow, etc.

This is really effective as it seems Thunderbird transmits the tag value back with the email into the IMAP server, so when someone else on their own computer logs into the queue, they can see the color change as well.

The problem with this is that recently our support staff has grown beyond 5 people, and so we need more than 5 colors. 

Thunderbird allows the assigning of custom colors with custom names to emails, but it doesn't seem to transmit the custom colors back to the server, so the custom colors are not viewable by the entire staff, only locally on the technician's computer.

My guess is that Thunderbird is just making use of some functionality of mail-servers which has a preset 1-5 mail priority value. But my hope is that Thunderbird can use the same technique or something similar to allow a virtually infinite number of custom colors (or 16.9 million perhaps). I really don't know how the transaction works.

In summary:

Is it possible to add features to Thunderbird to allow the network communication of Thunderbird with a mail server to transmit locally-assigned custom color-tags so that all clients seeing the same set of mail can see those colors?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Feature Request, no steps.
Color tags located in the right-click menu of the main mail window; right-click on any letter in the list and select the "Tags" menu, then assign a color or click "New Tag" to create a custom tag.



Feature is platform-independent. Functionality is lacking in either linux or Windows distribution of Thunderbird.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

as long as each technician makes the same mapping between tags (of which there can be an arbitrary number) and colors, then the colors would map between machines. If you've only got a handful of technicians, this should be easy enough.

Comment 2

[James]

Thank you, that worked like a charm.

I would remind anyone who reads this though, that this change, while it works, is still a workaround.

I would still recommend developing a feature to designate colors for a networked group of users using a similar solution as us - where a supervisor adds the color and it is established for all users.

Or perhaps more universally effective, an "Export Settings" option for Thunderbird which would generate a file so that a supervisor could Designate all the necessary colors, server settings and so forth and then just Import the Settings for any new employees.

Comment 3

[zug_treno]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Or perhaps more universally effective, an "Export Settings" option for
> Thunderbird <..>

Duplicate of bug 314744?

Comment 4

[ovidiu]

Another way which actually is more close to what you want (sharing tag settings) is 
*get mailtweak extension
http://mailtweak.mozdev.org/installation.html
*tools/addons/mailtweak options scroll to "tag tools" and check
*ok, ok ..

*options/display/ tags will present more refined instruments
-import/export of settings
-!!see pool, which is probably what you ask for(In reply to comment #3)