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Thunderbird/Feature Brainstorming: Difference between revisions
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Make a option panel for the message thread feature so users can make it look more like the conversations in Gmail. It would be very useful if for example incoming messages would be filtered and automatically added to the conversation they belong to. | Make a option panel for the message thread feature so users can make it look more like the conversations in Gmail. It would be very useful if for example incoming messages would be filtered and automatically added to the conversation they belong to. | ||
== Store and view messages in any file system folder == | |||
One of the most common recommendations made for organizing information on a computer is to group data files by topic. For example a businesses may create a separate folder for each project and into that folder place all the files (documents, spreadsheets, pictures, etc.) related to that project. | |||
Individuals can do something similar with their personal data. For example a person may group files related to their personal financial data into one folder and files related to a home remodeling project into another. | |||
It is often much easier to stay organized this way than the alternative method of storing everything by the type of program that created a given file. If you store files by the type of program that created a file it is almost impossible to keep track of how these files relate to anything else. | |||
Unfortunately this is how almost all email programs work. All email messages are grouped (on the hard drive) into one folder or worse, a single file. Even if you "see" many folders in the program, to a file manager (e.g. Explorer) everything is just one big block of data that is difficult to break apart and store elsewhere. | |||
Today if a client calls a business to ask about their project, an employee can potentially find almost everything they need in a project folder except e-mail messages. This was not a significant problem years ago when there likely was only a limited amount of project related email. However today most individuals and companies have a huge amount of email accumulating in their inbox and no practical way to pick out individual messages and store them with other related files. | |||
Therefore it would be nice if Thunderbird gave people the option of sorting their messages into any folder located on the local file system (hard drive, network share, etc). This shouldn’t be too difficult since the "Local folders" feature already comes close to doing this already. Each "folder" is just a file that contains the messages. | |||
Ideally a user would have the ability to add a real file system folder (and all of its subfolders) to the folder view. Then when they "move" a message into one of these folders, Thunderbird would simply create a new (or append to an existing) file that would contain the message. For example a user may add a new folder under the folder view and point it to say "C:\Projects". Then when they receive an email related to a given project they can simply drill down to "Projects\ProjectNumber" and drag the message from their InBox into that folder. | |||
The main work of implementing this feature would likely happen when a user tries to "view" an email file using a file manager (e.g. Explorer). What would need to happen is that when they click on an email file Thunderbird would have to start up and load this file for them to view. Since in this case Thunderbird would not be able to assume that a given email file is a part of the current users "folder tree", there would probably need to be some type of "file viewer" mode created in Thunderbird. However this isn't much different than what Thunderbird does now when a user restores their email from backup. | |||