502110 - Smarter Sender/Recipient column (like Eudora's 'who') would be nice

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 359270

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Evan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060214 Firefox/3.0.11
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 2.0.0.22 (20090302)

Thunderbird offers two columns -- Recipient and Sender -- that display information about who is involved with an email. What would be ideal is a column that will display the sender if I didn't send the mail, and the recipient if I did.

However, in most cases, exactly one of these columns contains almost no information. If I'm in my "Inbox", I know that I am the recipient on everything. If I'm in my "Sent" folder, I know that I am the sender on everything. (Multiple recipients mess this up a little bit, but it's still true to a fairly large extent.)

I have my mail organized into folders based on the month I sent or received it. (Basically that's no organization except to cut down on the number of messages in any folder for performance reasons.) Searching is good enough.

If I have separate archive folders for sent and received email, then per-folder column settings would suffice. I would simply set the "recipient" column to show in my archived sent folders, and the "sender" column to show in my archived received folders.

However, I think I want to reorganize my mail so that sent and received mail is mixed together so that I can used the threaded view to see a full picture of discussions. In this case, there's no single column setting that displays the relevant information. Instead, I would have to turn on BOTH columns; but this wastes a lot of space for no gain.

What would be ideal is a column that will display the sender if I didn't send the mail, and the recipient if I did.

I haven't actually used it, but from what I can tell Eudora has a feature like this, and calls the column "who".

You could display a little icon -- like an arrow pointing towards the person's name if it names a recipient and away from the person's name if it names a sender -- to indicate which it is. If this icon were yet another column, you could even sort on it, which would be really spiffy.

There are some complications with this (like what if I have multiple accounts; how does Thunderbird tell if "I sent it", or if the reply-to address is different from the sender address), but even a pretty naive solution would probably work well for most people in most cases.

Reproducible: Always