456830 - messagereader: allow configuration of which headers to show

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[David Ascher (:davida)]

"Show all headers" is a loaded gun, which can cause havoc with the UI.  It is often used only to see specific headers, so one alternative would be to 

a) provide a UI to select specific headers to see in the "show details" view, for headers that should be seen on many/most messages.

b) promote "view source" as a way to really see all headers, as that UI works for per-message inspection

Comment 1

[Przemyslaw Bialik]

a) would be great but instead of b) I would propose different alternative (short term fix until a) - fixing Bug 223132

Comment 2

[Ronald Killmer]

Another alternative would be three view options from the View menu.  Netscape did this with there mail/news readers.  the options were
*Brief - 4 basic headers of To:, From:, Date:, Subject:
*Normal - Added items such as Reference:, Msg ID:, UA:, 
*All - Every thing except about:kitchen-sink

Given there are now more lines of header stuff than 10 years ago, the View 
Source window is now the only reasionable way to take them all in in there conceptual relationships. Viewing a Bugzilla CC notice I counted 23 lines of X-xxxx headers.

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

I rarely use the View > Headers > All setting, rather have it on Normal and use Message Source when I want to see the whole set of headers. Thus, I'd agree with the second paragraph of comment #2, especially as some structured entries (e.g., X-Spam-Report: by SpamAssassin) are mangled into a single line in the header pane.

On the other hand, I have some of the mailnews.headers.* prefs set to get more information in the normal view. A generalization of this mechanism may be good to allow specifying a set of additional headers a user is interested in for the default view.

Comment 4

[Przemyslaw Bialik]

Bug 223132 is fixed so Headers > All setting is now more usable (on the other hand view-source would be more usable with Bug 234466).

The UI to customize which headers to show could look similar to this of Mnenhy (it's from the old version but it gives the idea)
http://mnenhy.mozdev.org/images/customheaders1.png

Comment 5

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

This probably shouldn't be in the compose component...

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

The message reader is being largely rebuilt for version 115. So this issue is will not be fixed for the current version 102.

When 115 becomes available in July please file a new bug if the problem exists in version 115. You can also evalute the changes in 3-4 weeks by trying a beta build.