509796 - Original Message Date part of "Reply" composition

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 438375

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Toni Bryant]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.22 (20090605)

Thanks for a great E-mail program.  One irksome item though.

This occurs when E-mail Composition and Addressing  preferences are set to: 
"AUTOMATICALLY QUOTE THE ORIGINAL MESSAGE WHEN REPLYING, START MY REPLY ABOVE THE QUOTE"

When replying to a message, either all or original sender, It would be extremely helpful to have the date and time of the original message appear with the message in the new composition window.  When trying to follow a thread, there is no way to tell which message was received first or last. Also if making reference to a reply there is no confirmation within the message as when it was sent.

PLEASE have the original date and time stamp of the original message being replied to, appear above the "XXXXX,XXXXX wrote:" line.  Example below in EXPECTED RESULTS.

Thanks in advance. 
[e-mail]

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.After reading an E-mail message.
2.Select "Reply"
3.
Actual Results:  
New window with the original message, cursor blinking above: XXXX, XXXXX Wrote:


Expected Results:  
It would be more useful to have the time stamp (date and time) INCLUDED above or below -- XXXX, XXXXX Wrote:  Example

XXXX, XXXXX Wrote:
MM/DD/YYY - HH:MM:SS *EDST
*time zone indicator, 24 hour format would probably be best.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

Adding the date and time of the original message to the reply header will be
the default in the upcoming Thunderbird 3.0 version per bug 438375. In the
current release versions, set mailnews.reply_header_type to a value of 2 (see
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reply_header_settings for available options).

The date used is the "short date" format as specified by your operating system
(see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Date_display_format which doesn't include the
time zone though, that's pending as bug 218926).

Comment 2

[Toni Bryant]

I was going to add that the format used for Printing E-mails, would be great for the COMPOSITION of a Reply message.  
It lists the: SUBJECT, FROM, DATE, TO

Thanks for listening (reading)
Toni

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

You are welcome. I did see only the date mentioned, thus I figured it's the same as bug 438375. There are some efforts to provide more flexible reply headers in bug 107884 and its dependencies, which got stalled though by now. Specifically for multi-line print-like headers, there is bug 218258 pending with pointers to extensions providing that functionality.