971085 - [RFE] Automatic naming of emails when drag'n'dropped as .eml files to computer folder

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Axel Mertes]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1700.107 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Drag and drop one or more selected emails from the Thunderbird window to a Windows file folder in order to export .eml files for archiving them along with other project data.


Actual results:

1. Whenever you have a ping-pong dialog with titles such as "Re:Your Mail.eml" it names it just "Your Mail.eml" - each email has the same name. 

This forces a user to manually rename the files as they get otherwise overwritten, requiring to export them one by one, which is meticulous and uselss, human failure prone.

2. Apparently illegal characters such as the ":" or "\" are getting filtered out, but the structure of the dialog is lost a bit that way. 


Expected results:

We need to archive email data prefereably alongside other project data, so that for a later reload from archive we have the according emails at hand immediately. The standart .eml format can be read on almost every computer without special software, so this should be a very simple and at the same time reliable back and archive method.

- Replace illegal characters with legal ones, such as ":" or "\" become e.g. "_" or "." 

- Append the email time with the notation " YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS" to the end of the email name. This way it would become unique and the whole dialog can be easily put into a directory on the harddisk for later retrieval or even import in other mail software. 

From emails called like this:

Your Mail
Re:Your Mail
Re:Re:Your Mail
Re:Re:Your Mail

you should get file names like this:

Your Mail.2012-01-01 00-00-00.eml 
Your Mail.2012-01-01 01-23-45.eml 
Your Mail.2012-01-02 19-21-15.eml 
Your Mail.2012-01-03 03-01-17.eml

This way one can manually select as many emails from a thread as he/she like and simply drag and drop them to a windows folder. The date & time stamp will make them immediately unique. If really a name is found, it may add something like an enumeration automatically as well:

Your Mail.2012-01-03 03-01-17.eml
Your Mail.2012-01-03 03-01-17.1.eml
Your Mail.2012-01-03 03-01-17.2.eml
and so on (which should be very rare in real world use).


I believe that THIS is a comparably easy to implement feature, but it has MAJOR impact on our use of Thunderbird.
Email archiving would never have been easier.

We are required to store emails along project data and keep them in one single archive. So email appliances make no sense in that context. We need to store the .eml files, as anything else would be proprietary and possibly no longer readable. .eml files are commonly supported. This way we have a very simple back strategy using open standart files on a disk. No learning curve required to use it.

None of the Thunderbird archive methods comes close to this. We tested almost every add-on, but they all focus on different workflows.

Kind regards,

Axel Mertes

PS: If a developer chimes in to make this happen, I'd be please if he/she wants to contact me about it.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Hi Axel,

thanks for writing this up. I generally agree with you; there's some bugs and RFEs on record in this corner.

Here's good news for you:

Your usecase is already covered, it's possible to save a selection of multiple messages with unique filenames in one go. Like this:

- select multiple messages in message list (e.g. using Ctrl or Shift for selection)
- File > Save as (or just Ctrl+S)
- choose target folder, press Enter - DONE. It's as simple as that.
Current Result: All messages, even with identical subjects, will be saved with unique names into target directory:

[Bug 634720] drag and drop to desktop does not work with multiple messages - [e-mail] - 2013-11-19 1153.eml

(although I'm not sure what happens when it's several messages that were sent same date, same minute).

Unfortunately, contrary to your comment 0, drag and drop of multiple messages into OS file manager currently isn't possible, neither from message list (Bug 634720), nor from attachment pane (Bug 270292).

Please let us know if the above alternative way of saving multiple messages solves your problem.

Are you suggesting that even for dragging/saving a *single* message, longer unique filenames including timestamp should be used?

Comment 2

[Axel Mertes]

Thanks for this info, I did not know that yet.

However, it would be HIGHLY APPRECIATED if drag and drop would result in the exact same behavior, ie. the same file names being generated.

It would also be nice if we can have at some point an editor to define how such files names are being constructed by using common "metadata" tags in a line. Thinking of this one:

Metadata tags such as:
[SubjectLine]
[DateTime]
[SenderName]
[SenderEmail]
[ReceivingOrderNumber]
etc.

and you can define the name of an exported email in settings then like this:

"[SubjectLine] - [SenderName] ([SenderEmail]) - [DateTime].eml"

Would result in exact the same what is currently exported.

For some reasons I would often prefer instead:

"[SubjectLine] [ReceivingOrderNumber] [DateTime] [SenderName].eml"

because this would result in emails to appear in their original order in the windows folder. 

Kind regards,
Axel