Thunderbird looks forward [LWN.net]

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 4:18 UTC (Thu) by kfiles (subscriber, #11628)
Parent article: Thunderbird looks forward

The whole HTML vs. plaintext thing in Thunderbird is my greatest gripe with the program. I generally want to send *and* compose only in plaintext. To do so, I have to set all sorts of preferences, including some inaccessible from the GUI.

However, once in a while, I need to send out an HTML mail (for long lines that can't be wrapped, or tables from a SQL query). To do so (as far as I've ever discovered), I have to change my account settings to compose in HTML, then for that message change the Options->Format to HTML to override my Plaintext Domains for sending the message.

I'm not sure I follow our Editor's specific header viewing complaint. I generally view messages with View->Headers->Normal, and expand the visible headers. This gives me Subject, From, Date, To and CC headers. That's not to say that I don't also wish to be able to customize the headers available in Normal mode.

As for Labels, one can only hope that they realize that any "label" or "tag" is only useful if you can *search* on it. I really wanted to like Labels, but found that the only way to find particular labels was to Sort By them. Why in the world is Thunderbird limited to searching only on message headers -- no date range, label, has-attachments, marked-as-junk, etc. for you!

--kirby

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Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 6:03 UTC (Thu) by Mithrandir (guest, #3031) [Link] (1 responses)

I've been going through the same thing to send the odd HTML message, but clicking on the "strange rituals" link in the article allowed me to glean this piece of information:

To compose an email in HTML when you normally use plain text, shift-click the "write" (compose new mail) button.

w00t!

Um, as for tags, wouldn't it be nice to be able to add a "due by" date to an email, rather than just "todo"? Just an idea.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 6, 2006 7:11 UTC (Thu) by illtyd (guest, #2124) [Link]

Thankyou Mithrandir!

Where was this useful information hidden in the docs!

HTML vs text

Posted Apr 6, 2006 7:20 UTC (Thu) by kingdon (guest, #4526) [Link] (2 responses)

So the problems with HTML mail are probably obvious to most LWN readers (complicated to secure, too many variants of HTML, features which were designed for the web and don't belong in email, intrusive features like <BLINK> and animated images, etc).

But is plain text the right solution? I mean, sure it is for geeks like us, but what about people who want to have their paragraphs wrap (the #1 problem with plain text) and maybe even have a little bold or italics or other light formatting?

I got some email from someone (who I think is using a Mac) in text/enriched (RFC1896) format. Is it worth popularizing this? It might be a better solution than telling people to just go to plain text, but I don't know if it is *too* plain to interest anyone who isn't using plain text now.

HTML vs text

Posted Apr 6, 2006 9:28 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

what about people who want to have their paragraphs wrap

I might misunderstand you, but the following header
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
doesn't solve this problem? The pine help mentions RFC3676 where this is specified.

Bye,NAR

HTML vs text

Posted Apr 18, 2006 12:47 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Where's the problem with light formating? *bold* and /italic/, even
_underline_ works fine in a newsreader like knode. It's supposed to work
in mails, too. What's the difficulty to add a similar renderer to the
mail tool and set to a common standard for ASCII formatting?

* bullet point

- enumerate

> quote

Seems all to be too obvious.

label search

Posted Apr 6, 2006 22:02 UTC (Thu) by pdundas (guest, #15203) [Link]

You can sort of search on labels!

In Thunderbird 1.5, the "view" pull-down menu above the message list panel offers, besides "all" & "unread", each of the defined labels - so you can show only your messages tagged "important" or "later" or "personal".

the pain of "view headers"

Posted Apr 6, 2006 22:13 UTC (Thu) by pdundas (guest, #15203) [Link] (1 responses)

To my mind, the biggest problems with view headers are these:

When you show all headers, you can't scroll them out of the way. With 1200 vertical pixels it's not a problem, but with a 600x800 screen (I have old hardware too) it's truly painful. You can't even scroll down to see the lower headers! Even if there are unusually few headers, you're likely to be restricted to a line or two of the email, in a tiny scrolling area.

"Use 'view source' instead" is not really the answer to this problem!

This is aggravated by the next problem: If you're stuck in one-line email mode, as above, you can't change the view headers mode from full to normal and back without going to the view menu and navigating down through header options. There should be a right-click or a button for this (though the [+] shrink the headers is a help).

Overall it's not too bad a client though.

the pain of "view headers"

Posted Apr 8, 2006 1:52 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (guest, #30178) [Link]

there's an extension available called "header scroll extension". i bet you can guess what it does. ;)

i don't know why however, something as simple as adding a scroll bar when the headers scroll off the bottom of the window requires a third party add-on.

Thunderbird looks forward

Posted Apr 13, 2006 10:47 UTC (Thu) by kaig1969 (guest, #37135) [Link]

I installed the mhneny extension. It allows me to customize which headers are shown. Alas, I think that mheny and the header scroll extension do not seem to play ball with each other.