837543 - Individual addresses in mailing lists should include TO, CC, or BCC option

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 163498

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[eric raeburn]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.58 Safari/537.22

Steps to reproduce:

This is an enhancement request, for functionality that is really very basic.

When a mailing list is created, the user should be able to specify whether the recipients are to be TOs, CCs, or BCCs. For example, an engineer should be able to create a list in which colleagues are TOs, the manager and marketing people are CCs, and the engineer himself and a colleague in another group are BCCs. So when the user selects that list as the recipient, the send status of each outgoing address is already set; the user wouldn't have to (as is currently the case) manually change every recipient whom he wants to be something other than CC.

The workaround (three separate mailing lists, one for each set of TOs, CCs, and BCCs) is less inconvenient, but still inconvenient.

This feature was part of the first mailer I used in the 1980s, a primitive text-based program running on a mainframe. It really should be part of any modern email interface.

Thanks for your consideration.


Actual results:

Not applicable.


Expected results:

Not applicable.

Comment 1

[:aceman]

Yes, this would be nice but probably too hard to do currently.

Mconley, could the new addressbook cover this in some way?
Surely something needs to be updated in the composition window too, but the data first needs to be stored in AB.

Comment 2

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

(In reply to :aceman from comment #1)
> Yes, this would be nice but probably too hard to do currently.
> 

We currently do a hack for the EDS contacts extension where mailing lists are allowed to have preferences set on them (since they inherit from nsIAbDirectory). The "HidesRecipients" pref, when set to true, makes sure that a mailing list populates the BBC field when choosing to write from them from the address book.

We don't expose that behaviour to the core Thunderbird UI since it's really very much a hack.

> Mconley, could the new addressbook cover this in some way?
> Surely something needs to be updated in the composition window too, but the
> data first needs to be stored in AB.

Yes, I can see this being supported.

Comment 3

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Re: HidesRecipients - the relevant code is here: http://mxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mail/components/addrbook/content/abCommon.js#325