542808 - Recipient names should be randomly ordered by TB before message is sent

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.2pre) Gecko/20100128 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.2
Build Identifier: 3.0

It's annoying that people often think the order of the email addresses in the To and CC fields has relevance to how much you care about them. This is especially true when you send a message to a handful of your friends.

To solve this, TB should have a new option that says, "Randomize order of email addresses before sending." Then, when the message is sent the order of the addresses are randomized so that if the recipients /think/ it has relevance, well, they'll be wrong.

Should be an easy thing to implement, and the kind of thing that's great for PR.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

I suspect this properly belongs as an extension, rather than as TB core behavior, but am not qualified to argue the point.

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

Nor I, though I guess I should point out that this seems like something everybody would want in all mail readers.

I'd be interested in hearing reasons not to have something like this in core.

Comment 3

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

Basically the usual: wanting to avoid unnecessary bloat and maintenance hassles with a feature that few have thought of requesting*. There might be some others, but those are what I was mostly thinking of.

There /is/ one good reason to include this in core, of course: for this feature to be any real use, it has to be advertised as such, and Thunderbird (or MailNews?) core seems like a good place to do it. OTOH, I doubt that even Thunderbird itself has enough mindshare to push this idea of "recipients are added in random order" very far -- it might be easier for an extension to add something to your .sig, rather than relying on creating a new convention.


*Note that I have not had this particular social problem, and so I am evidently not one of the target audience. I don't know how large the target audience is, but that's something to consider.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I very much doubt something like this is ever going to be really useful.

Most users won't understand why there is a problem and hence why we'd then need to randomize. So we'd end up spending lots of time explaining it.

You'd also then run the risk that your friends don't actually realise you are randomising the order and read something different into each email you send.

I really don't see anything here that Thunderbird can "fix" by implementing something.

Experimenting with the idea as an extension is, of course, quite possible and would be the best way to investigate this idea and the impact.

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

Fair enough.

Unrelatedly, does TB do any user testing or analysis? It would be great if there was some kind of survey system where questions like this could be analyzed.