688147 - detect when I am sending from the "wrong" account

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Many users configure Thunderbird to read/send mails from/to several accounts, including both personal and professional accounts. It is quite easy to select the account from which to send a message, but it is also quite easy to send from the wrong account, e.g. sending a personal message from a professional account or vice-versa. This can lead to embarrassing situations.

I would like Thunderbird to help users to avoid this mistake.

A possible manner of doing this would be to have Thunderbird learn automatically how to map correspondents to accounts, using both received messages and sent messages, and to warn the user when s/he is about to send a message that breaks the pattern.

The same classification could also be used to quickly search within received mails for mails that the correspondent has mistakenly sent to the wrong address – a less common but possibly annoying scenario, e.g. when your better half sends urgent e-mails to your professional address.

Comment 1

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Possible extensions of this feature: confidentiality rules that warn the user when s/he is about to send a message to the outside of the organization with an e-mail address that should be used for the inside communication, or when s/he is about to send a message to someone who should probably not have the right to receive communications from him/her (e.g. Bell & Lapadula security policies).

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/flexible-identity/ provides some of this capability

David, there are several bugs from which to choose, for marking this bug as a duplicate [1]. Perhaps the most likely ones are listed in Bug 228980 - [Meta] Identity selection based on recipients should be more correc

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=1341196&short_desc=account%20ident&resolution=---&query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=anywordssubstr&type0-0-0=nowords&value0-0-0=count%20counts&component=Composition&component=Message%20Compose%20Window&product=MailNews%20Core&product=Thunderbird

Comment 3

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

While the general goal (and the bug title) are indeed similar to bug 36482, bug 228980 or add-on flexible-identity, it is my understanding that the proposed underlying mechanism is quite different.


The idea here would be to automatically parse every incoming/received and outgoing/sent mail to learn trivial patterns, e.g. I have always received mails from foo@bar on account sna@baz, or I have always sent mails to foo@bar from account sna@baz, so next time I send an e-mail to foo@bar from a different account, my TB should warn me.


Note: I'm not sure about classification, but since it is about learning patterns, I personally wouldn't place this in Message Compose Window.