Open Bug 457177 Opened 16 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Associate/link emails with tasks or appointments/events and vice versa

Categories

(Calendar :: General, enhancement)

enhancement

Tracking

(thunderbird_esr78 wontfix)

90 Branch
Tracking Status
thunderbird_esr78 --- wontfix

People

(Reporter: robrwo, Unassigned)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug)

Details

(Keywords: leave-open)

Attachments

(2 files)

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092213 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.2
Build Identifier: N/A

One often gets an e-mail that is associated with a task or appointment (e.g. please do x, or here is meeting agenda, etc.).  If would be convenient to associate e-mails with tasks and appointments, so that one can move between calendar, tasks and e-mail screen, but also so that e-mails associated with due dates are highlighted in some way.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
N/A
Summary: [RFE] Associate e-mails with tasks or appointments → Associate emails with tasks or appointments/events
Yes, I just wanted to request this enhancement also. Luckily I found yours before I hit the submit button.
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Summary: Associate emails with tasks or appointments/events → Associate emails with tasks or appointments/events and vice versa
Attached image screenshot —
You asked for a screenshot on the other bug. This is not exactly the one, but it shows the email as it is opened in Thunderbird. So, you could add additional scheduling information, as well as actions like (accept, decline, followup in 5 days, etc), right below the From/To heading. Basically the email message viewer would replace the Lightning's own even viewer. the handy thing is that actions like Forward and Reply already present in there.
Also, when converting a mail to task or event (or reverse), it would be very convenient to keep a dynamic link between both related items, to be able to jump from one to the other...
Summary: Associate emails with tasks or appointments/events and vice versa → Associate/link emails with tasks or appointments/events and vice versa
I tried to "attach" a Thunderbird (v12) message to an Event in Lightning (v1.4), as follows:

I created an event and used as an attachment the link which is shown when we open the source display of a message, for example: 

file:///G:/MyThunderbird1/ThunderbirdPortable/Data/profile/Mail/Local%20Folders/Local%20Stuff?number=33805

When I try to open the above "attachment", TB/Lightning asks me for an application, and I select Thunderbird. However, after that, nothing happens; neither I see the selected message in Thunderbird, nor anything else seems to be happening. 

Is there a way we could modify the above process so that we could succeed in using TB mail messages as attachments in Lightning Events?
Hmm, correction to the above: 

The link is in fact ("mailbox" not "file", as I incorrectly wrote in my earlier post): 

mailbox:///G:/MyThunderbird1/ThunderbirdPortable/Data/profile/Mail/Local%20Folders/Local%20Stuff?number=33805

And this works!

This also happens to standard TB as well (because the above link is from TB portable). Example link:

mailbox:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Administrator/Application%20Data/Thunderbird/Profiles/pod7nlvr.default/Mail/Local%20Folders/Local%20Stuff?number=855

So, even manually, we can do the trick!

Obviously, there would be a problem in case we move the message to another folder. But - I assume - if we keep the message in the same folder, "number" value will remain constant?

Regards, 
Nick
As mentioned previously, the option to convert an email to a task really just creates a task with the content of the email in the body of that task. At this moment, when a task becomes actionable, I have to copy/paste the subject of the task into the search bar of the email portion of Thunderbird, as I want to retrieve that original email and others in that conversation (allows to e.g. respond to the last email in that conversation). It would be great to have a proper link between a task and an email, so that one doens't need to do that unproductive copy/paste all day long.
FYI in Outlook, I create tasks with the email as an attachment. At least you can double click on the attachment and use the "search all related emails" option to get to the latest email in that chain, or if you needed to reply to that very specific email, you already have it there.
If we can find some more neutral uri to the message that doesn't change when the installation is moved somewhere else (i.e. doesn't contain the absolute path), then it would probably be fairly easy to add that link to the event.

For next steps, this really just need someone to drive it and create the patch.
(In reply to Nick Milas from comment #7)
> I tried to "attach" a Thunderbird (v12) message to an Event in Lightning
> (v1.4), as follows:
> 
> I created an event and used as an attachment the link which is shown when we
> open the source display of a message, for example: 
> 
> file:///G:/MyThunderbird1/ThunderbirdPortable/Data/profile/Mail/
> Local%20Folders/Local%20Stuff?number=33805

Where do you see this - in source's window Caption?
My message source caption looks like 
"Source: imap://sulfur@mail.yandex.ru:933/fetch%3EUID%3E/INBOX%3E1997"
And I can't open this from attachment to task - it opens only http://.
There are alternative solve for the problem: "Tasks and mails" extension.
It very simple and pretty useful, so I'll use it till we have same functionality in Lightning.
You can also experiment with extension ThunderLink - it really works in proper conditions.

Ben, are you the person looking at reimagining gloda?

Flags: needinfo?(benc)
See Also: → 167669

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #14)

Ben, are you the person looking at reimagining gloda?

Not at the moment, but I could imagine that's the kind of thing I could end up on.
Are you thinking to link the task back to it's source email via some kind of searchable phrase (like messageID or something)?
The planned messageDB rewrite would be another alternative in such a case: if the messageDB becomes global (rather than per-folder), presumably you could link via messageID without worrying what folder it was in (or if it appeared in multiple folders).

Flags: needinfo?(benc)

I think mid: links (bug 264270) would make this solvable. It can, to a degree, be implemented without a global db too.

Depends on: mid-urls
Component: Lightning Only → General

As a first step we should at least do this when one uses the (from the More button) Convert To > Event.

All it may take is to in https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/fcb2f819cde716b9ed6596168f5a0498819b88a0/calendar/base/content/calendar-dnd-listener.js#41 add the "URL" property, with the value mid:exampeid@exampe.com

Assignee: nobody → lasana

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #19)

As a first step we should at least do this when one uses the (from the More button) Convert To > Event.

All it may take is to in https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/fcb2f819cde716b9ed6596168f5a0498819b88a0/calendar/base/content/calendar-dnd-listener.js#41 add the "URL" property, with the value mid:exampeid@exampe.com

That's the code for drag and drop. The More > Convert To > Event menu uses this:
https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/calendar/base/content/calendar-extract.js#78

Also by "URL" property do you mean the Location field or otherwise? There does not seem to be UI for for a URI field.
Never mind, I think I found it.

Flags: needinfo?(mkmelin+mozilla)
Flags: needinfo?(mkmelin+mozilla)
Depends on: 1706158

So happy to see movement on this ticket after so long, I'll be happy to drop my contraption of adding manual hashes to titles to be able to track event origins.

Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Target Milestone: --- → 90 Branch

Pushed by mkmelin@iki.fi:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/1ec454959ce8
Include messageId as URL property when creating event/task from email. r=mkmelin

There's a slight mistake here so we'll have to adjust this.

The URL property is https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.8.4.6 - This property may be used in a calendar component to convey a location where a more dynamic rendition of the calendar information associated with the calendar component can be found.

What we should be adding is the URI property: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.3.13 - This value type might be used to reference binary information, for values that are large, or otherwise undesirable to include directly in the iCalendar object.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #24)

There's a slight mistake here so we'll have to adjust this.

The URL property is https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.8.4.6 - This property may be used in a calendar component to convey a location where a more dynamic rendition of the calendar information associated with the calendar component can be found.

Seeing as the event is created from the details of an email, isn't the email "a more dynamic rendition of the calendar information"?

I think it's not really, it seems URL should be the url you can programmatically get the last update for the item.
Quite possible the email doesn't even say anything about the actual event, but had info related to it.

Status: ASSIGNED → NEW
Assignee: lasana → nobody
Severity: normal → S3
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