420022 - Ask me what to do prompt when sending an HTML eMail needs a remember setting tick

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Merlin Cul Kirkpatrick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Build Identifier: 20080213

The "Ask me what to do" Dialog that pops up if you have this setting selected to ask if you want to send the letter in HTML or TEXT etc... needs a checkbox on it to remmeber the setting to then be set in the matching addressbook entry so that I do not have to go and set every single one manually I can just do it as I go.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. In "Send Options" turn on "Ask me what to do"
2. Create an addressbook entry with no HTML or Text defaults selected.
3. Send a letter to that eMail of the addressbook entry.
4. When prompted for how to send the letter (HTML or Plain Text) note that it will do that every time you send to that person.


Expected Results:  
I want a checkbox at the bottom of the dialog asking how to send the letter that will update the matching addressbook entry.  this should of course be case "insensitive" when looking for the matching eMail address.  (:

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

You can set the preference in the address book. If you send to more than one person, making it "remember" from that dialog could be challenging to get a good UI for.

Comment 2

[Merlin Cul Kirkpatrick]

Yes, that is a good point.  So a good start, would be to disable it when you are sending to more then one person and only enable it when they are sending to one person.

But that brings up the next point.  In the addressbook I cannot find how to set it for multiple people.  I have 300 people in my addressbook.  Most of them I send HTML letters to.  But I have no way to set that for them without going into each one individually and assigning it.  I suppose the prompting would not be such a huge thing if we could do it manually to multiple people.  But then that would be a whole new bug entry.  (:

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Merlin (reporter), your input to improve TB is appreciated, and improvement is indeed needed in this corner.

However, in agreement with Magnus comment 1, and reporter's comment 2 which also somewhat backtracks on this, I think its impossible to come up with a feasible UI for this as requested by comment 0. We can't ask for each address when sending a single mail to many contacts with different HTML/text preferences. And setting for *all* of them *at sending time* would be strange. I think comment 2 is pointing better directions: The overall handling of HTML vs. plaintext setting needs improvement, e.g. allow mass-changing the preference for many contacts.

Otherwise for starters, this is 2014, and the days of 56K modem internet connections and text-only email clients are mostly gone, so the default for new contacts should be "HTML format", which would eliminate a lot of UX problems for the majority of users already. For those odd contacts that still *require* plaintext, let the minority of affected users change the setting - fair enough. For an overview of such problems, see:

[Bug 889315] [Meta] Tracker bug for delivery format UX issues (HTML vs. Plaintext; incl. interaction of {Delivery Format | Auto-Detect} with other settings and related UX-failures)

This entire HTML vs. plaintext question thing is no longer the default and I guess we could just as well rip it out without anyone complaining except the original developer... I'm quite sure we don't want this mess to become even more complex per comment 0.

Also, nobody ever spoke up in support of this since bug was filed, and a quick tentative search for dupes has yielded nothing.

-> wontfix

Comment 4

[Merlin Cul Kirkpatrick]

Dude!  I wrote this back in 2008.  I do not even remember what this was for.  Is this for Thunderbird or a Thunderbird program?  I believe as a work around I was forced to set everything to HTML as I would create the address card.  I believe this was an issue because AOL was taking a VERY long time getting on board with the whole HTML eMail thing and was not compatible with HTML Thunderbird eMails.  I suspect that is no longer an issue.