466844 - Feature Request: A follow-up-function for sent mail that reminds the user of pending replies

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Frank Sauer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4

Users often sent emails containing times or dates at which they expect something to happen -- e.g. receiving a reply no later than a specific deadline. I often solve this problem by sending emails to myself in BCC. This is an unsatisfactory workaround because over time myinbox gets clogged and I also tend to lose track of the necessary follow-ups spread out over all the individual mails. 

This is why an automatic follow-up-feature would be great in Thunderbird.

It could work like this: By right-clicking and chosing "Follow-up" for an email in your sent-folder, you activate the reminder-function and Thunderbird prompts you for entering a date and a time at which a specific operation is to be performed. E.g. an alert slider could pop up and remind you that there has not been a reply (meaning: no email with same Subject or an according message-id) to yout sent mail or that same email could just be placed back into your inbox in order to remind you of attending to it once more

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Christian Lehmann]

I would like to support this request whole-heartedly. Here are just a few modifications of the proposal for its implementation:

1) I call the follow-up function not by working on the copy in the sent-mail folder, but already while writing my message. My request, however, is stored with the copy in the sent-mail folder.
2) The only thing I need to fix in the dialogue is a date until which a reply must be received. See #4 for the reminder.
3) Thunderbird regards the follow-up requirement as fulfilled if a message from the addressee in question with the subject in question is received by the date in question. If that happens, it resets the follow-up flag for that message copy. The user is then free to set it again. (It could also be done interactively.)
4) If no answer is received by the deadline, the message copy in the sent folder is marked. That might be a symbol in the message-threads column, or else the entire line in the messages list gets a red background. Moreover, the sent folder in the folders directory is marked if it contains at least one message with an overdue answer. The user can reset that mark manually.

Comment 3

[Franck LEFEVRE]

This is just a short comment to confirm that since I first thought about this feature a few weeks ago, I miss it constantly...