Re: [Evolution] Bounce/remail command

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

Dan Winship wrote:
> There are "Reply" and "Reply To All" buttons that do the obvious
> things.

Minor nit: please call it "Reply to Sender" instead of simply "Reply"
to maximize obviousness.  Neither of these commands is more important or
more "reply-like" than the other.

> If you reply to an HTML message, it does the appropriate HTML quoting.
> (Is there a standard for that?) 

I've seen a few proposals, and they were all rather baroque and silly;
I don't know if anything ever made it to an RFC, but it's worth
investigating.

Quoting/citing text in an HTML composer is... hard.

> If forwarding doesn't include all of the "Received" headers by
> default, then there will be an option to do that, for spam/harassment
> reporting ease.

I think it should include all the headers.  Since it's properly
MIME-typed, nobody's going to see those unless they do "show all
headers" anyway.  Netscape does this and nobody has ever complained.

> Having a "forward as multipart/digest" command would be nice. 

The only differences between multipart/mixed and multipart/digest are:

 m/d may only contain objects of type message/rfc822;
 the default type for untyped objects in m/d is message/rfc822.

So if I multi-select a few messages and hit the forward button in
Netscape, then type some text in the body of the composition window,
what gets generated is:

   message/rfc822
     multipart/mixed
       text/plain (my new text)
       message/rfc822 (attachment 1)
       message/rfc822 (attachment 2)
       message/rfc822 (attachment 3)

If you wanted to do this with multipart/digest, you'd have to do it like
this:

   message/rfc822
     multipart/mixed
       text/plain (my new text)
       multipart/digest
         message/rfc822 (attachment 1)
         message/rfc822 (attachment 2)
         message/rfc822 (attachment 3)

If you do end up using multipart/digest, then there should not be a
separate command for it, that should just be how forwarding works.

I couldn't see any benefit to doing that, which is why I didn't.

However, a very useful pair of commands to implement (on the recipient
side) are: "explode message", that is, extract the message/rfc822
attachments in the current message and turn them into top-level messages
in the current folder; and also, view the current message as a virtual
folder.

I think that these commands should operate on both mult/mixed and
mult/digest, and should just ignore attachments that are not messages.

(When coding evolution, be careful always handle message/news the same
way as message/rfc822.  Except in very specialized cases, they're
identical, but both occur in nature.)

> It seems like there might be other operations you'd want to do on
> multiple messages (delete, refile, etc), so it will probably be
> possible to select multiple messages at once in the message list
> (shift click or whatever), in which case you could just click
> "Forward" after doing that, and voila.

Of course -- the mail reader would be unusable if you couldn't do this. 
You also need to be able to drag/drop a message onto the composer and
have it be attached with the appropriate type.

> There will be a "resend/bounce/remail" command. While "Resend" is the
> RFC-appropriate name for this operation, it may be worthwhile to come
> up with a name which more clearly states its intended purpose.
...
> Does anything think any of this is horribly horribly wrong, or that
> there are other "get mail from your inbox to someone else's inbox"
> sorts of operations that are not covered by this?

Are you planning to implement template messages, for canned replies?
I think that if you do that (and you should, cause it's useful in its
own right), then you can eliminate the desire for a resend command at
all.

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
jwz dnalounge com       http://www.dnalounge.com/