705704 - Hide email address in From: selection

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Description

[Pander]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111107 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.24
Build ID: 20111107175754

Steps to reproduce:

While composing an email, select another email adres in From: selection.


Actual results:

A list of all registered email addresses allowed to choose for From: are listed in terms of Name (if available) and the email address itself.

When I am working together with another person behind my computer, I do not want that person to see the email address of some of the listings for From: because of privacy reasons.


Expected results:

For those cases which I do not want other people to see the email address, I would only like to see the Name.

In Manage Identities... -> Edit ... the tab Composition & Addressing should offer an option called "Hide E-mail in From Selection" By default this option is False. Since Name is not required, the checkbox to alter this option is greyed out when no Name is set. Only when a name is set, the user can set "Hide E-mail in From Selection" to true. This dependency should be noted in near the controls or its label. Setting this to True would not display the email address for this particular Identity in the From: selection when composing an email.

alternatively, this option can also be added to the Settings tab instead.

Implementing this will increase the privacy for users of Thunderbird and prevent accidental embarrassment or worse.

Comment 1

[Andre Klapper]

(In reply to Pander from comment #0)
> For those cases which I do not want other people to see the email address, I
> would only like to see the Name.

What if you have a contact with several email addresses (e.g. work and private)?
How would you distinguish which address you will send it to?

> Implementing this will increase the privacy for users of Thunderbird and
> prevent accidental embarrassment or worse.

I vote rather for hiding also the names of the recipients as those are also a risk (the person behind you could use a search engine to find out who these people are). Sounds safer to me.

Comment 2

[Pander]

I think you are mixing contact and identities. In short:

I have several identities from which I regularly compose emails, to whom (which contact) is irrelavant for my request. When I am working with another person behind my computer and I do need to change the From: while composing, I do not want that person to see all of the identies I have to send email from. For example I have a personal and work identity and it is fine that another person with whom I am working with can see when I need to swithc From:.

I also have a users.sourceforge.net identity for my open source contributions but I do not want the person next to me to see that particular email adress in the list when I'm choosing From: to protect myself from unwanted background searches, for example.

Did this example explain it more clearly?