718429 - Remind me that I expect an answer within 24h

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: Tasks, enhancement)

Description

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

I would like to be able to mark an e-mail that I am about to send as "I expect an answer within 24h (or some other time period)". If no reply has been received within 24h, nag me with the usual alert. Cancel the alert once the user asks for the alert to be canceled or once a reply is received.

Comment 1

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

Related to Bug 293194?

Comment 2

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

Right again.

Comment 3

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Also check out the follow up extension which I believe allows exactly this.

See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/follow-up/

Comment 4

[Jonathan Protzenko [:protz]]

So if we are to do this right, there's a lot of problems involved. The main one is "how do we figure out there's a reply?". There is actually a surprisingly high amount of MUAs (mail user agents) who fail to set the correct mail headers, thus preventing Thunderbird from threading related messages together, hence preventing Gloda (or anyone else) from figuring out which message the email is replying to.

This issue is discussed at length at https://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/wiki/What-is-threading (see also bug 663270).

Basically,
- a lot of email gateways rewrite message-ids,
- a lot of MUAs: pretty much all mobile agents, k9 mail, default mail client in android (at least on my phone), but also old versions of outlook, lotus notes, etc. etc.
don't include the References: and In-Reply-To: headers. This is what allows you to know which message the person on the other end is replying to. Without it, you have to go a long way to reconstruct the broken information.

So, yes, that would be a nice feature, but definitely hard to get right. There's a lot of legwork involved.

Here's some steps involved:
- fixing bug 663270 would probably be a good first step,
- the, replicating the logic into Gloda,
- hook something to be notified when gloda figures out about a newly arrived message,
- code up the rest, which is then trivial.

Comment 5

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

(In reply to Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen] from comment #3)
> Also check out the follow up extension which I believe allows exactly this.
> 
> See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/follow-up/

Good point. However, follow-up is more related to bug 718428.

Comment 6

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

Moved to bug 718428