We should remove the All Headers mode from mail. It's a geeky feature, and even for geeks, it's not as useful as View Source. Even if problems with the header view (bug 9942, bug 61497) and with All Headers (bug 23114, bug 106358, bug 106679, bug 49305, bug 50138, etc.) were fixed, I still don't think it would be useful. View > Headers > All seems to be used for three things: 1. Looking at the headers before reporting spam. 2. Figuring out how to filter a message. 3. Finding out the version number of an unreleased Netscape upgrade by looking at the User-Agent header from users with netscape.com addresses. These are all easier to do with View Source, because entering View Source is easier than entering All Headers mode, and leaving View Source is easier than leaving All Headers mode. Filtering would be even easier with a context menu item "filter messages like this..." in the thread pane (bug 11036). Leaving All Headers mode on all the time doens't make sense because it takes up half the screen even with a small font, bug 49305 unfixed, and at 1024x768 resolution. Having the All Headers mode forces the View menu to have a submenu called "Headers" rather than a checkable item that switches between Brief and Normal. Because there's a submenu, it's harder to find the keyboard shortcut for the more useful Brief Headers feature (bug 60207, bug 61495). Interaction between the three modes is complicated (bug 66298, bug 70192, bug 144622). The only argument I have heard for keeping the feature is "4xp". There are two problems with the 4xp argument: 1. Our current implementation of All Headers is very buggy. By the time we fix All Headers, 4.x will be long gone. 2. A major upgrade (4.x to Mozilla or 7.x) is a good time for users to re-explore the menus. If we don't remove it now, when will we remove it?

If there is a consensus its not needed, thats fine with me.

As soon as bug 9942 is fixed, this feature will be used by myself. I usually leave all headers on at all times. It's only off in Mozilla because it takes up space and breaks scrolling. Unless there is an overriding necessity to remove a feature, why remove it?

It would be good to be able to control this per folder. I only look at the headers of spam so I can find out what sites to block. I don't look at the body of the spam so seeing the headers is quite convenient. It would be even better if I could automaticaly see the headers if I look in the spam folder, and not if I look anywhere else. I guess this could also be 'automaticly show source' for that folder. Just my 2c.

[From my point of view there're already far too many nice features removed: grippies, sidebar in mailnews, and so on.] Those want to see all headers should be able to do. A customized header view would be good also, as would be "clickable" references. Please don't be so fast with removing features! Mozilla claims to be not for the end user, so let's keep the good stuff in Mozilla. If a feature "confuses" parts of a vendor's clientel (eg Netscape), let them disable it in *their* builds. Keep the Lizard great!

I do not think we should remove View All Headers unless there are no plans to fix it. Currently, it does NOT display all the headers. When I need to see ALL the headers, I must always viewSource. WHY does this not display all the headers??? Maybe: The View>Headers> menu should have three items: Basic, Brief, All Basic: Display the current one-line summary Brief: Open the view to reveal Subject,From,To,Cc,Date and a closed subpanel All: Open the Brief panel and the subpanel revealing all the headers. Seems strange to have View>Headers choosing what may be displayed in a potentially closed panel. Should etablish a tighter connection of behaviour.

I don't want this bug "fixed", but then I don't want XUL headers either. I still use Netscape 3 for most email, with options->show headers->normal except when I need to see more for a given message, same as I do for reading news with Netscape 4.

I also vote that we not only keep "View all headers" but to make it show ALL the headers, as its name implies. I use this feature frequently.

It *does* show all headers, even the internal headers Mozilla adds. So what are you missing?

Depends what you mean by "all". At least one is censored. See bug 118899. OS->All

OK, my mistake. I was viewing with Mozilla 1.0. With 1.3, all the headers I wanted are showing. When I say 'all' I mean all the hops through the mailservers. It wasn't showing them in Mozilla 1.0, but is OK in 1.3. Now, please let's keep them available. Thanks, John Cirillo

Might I suggest that another possiblity would be to have a "View All Headers" button/menu item, that instead of toggling the option on through all windows, just shows it in the current window/pane, or opens a new window with just the header source And then just have an option in the preferences dialog where you would have dropdown for "All Headers/Brief Headers/No Headers/Normal Headers". Hope that helps ... I think it might improve the clarity of the GUI for the message

Just to add my own item here: View All Headers is a pain to pharse when reporting spam, ether manually or by copy/paste to Spamcop. You might as well just View Source instead, and go with that. At the very least make it an option you can disable at complile time. I won't mind adding --without-mailnews-allheaders to my ./configure line.

If you want to see all headers as part of your normal message view, you should be able to do so. That does not mean that this view must be fully copyable for spam reporting and the like; as you said, you better use source view for that. The impact of the all headers view upon codesize and build time is minimal, so removing it won't help much - but Tools like Enigmail and Mnenhy would be dead, because they rely upon headers only available in all headers mode. If you don't like the all headers view, simply select View->Headers->Normal. Actually, after nearly two years without consensus to remove it, I'm proposing marking this WONTFIX. The usefulness for those using it is far greater than the hindrance for those who don't like it.

I disagree; I'd love to see this menu item, and in fact this feature, removed. To my mind, this feature is not useful, and shouldn't be standard. If it is so desirable to a subset of users -- who are not novices -- it should be an extension. (Not a problem for Enigmail and Mnehy users.) If the feature itself is deemed Must Be Standard, then it should be handled with a twisty, in the same way Headers|Brief is handled now, rather than a menu. This could be either a second twisty (bug 150908), or a three-state twisty for headers (if someone wants to figure out a design for a three-state twisty). In either case, the second twisty (or third state) should be hidden/bypassed by a hidden pref that defaults to OFF. Far more sensible than a toggle between "some" and "all" would be a user- configurable list of which "some" are shown -- that is, bug 61523.

> I disagree; I'd love to see this menu item, and in fact this feature, > removed. Actually, Jesse's comment regarding the differences between "All Headers View" and "View Source" is quite true - but with userChrome.css rules like #msgHeaderView .header-part1 { overflow: auto; max-height: 20em; } the "All Headers View" *is* *usable*. (This CSS limits the header pane to a certain height.) You will have all headers available and you still can see the body. > To my mind, this feature is not useful, and shouldn't be standard. Why? > Far more sensible than a toggle between "some" and "all" would be a > user- configurable list of which "some" are shown -- that is, bug > 61523. (Ah, I wonder why I missed that bug. :| ) See, I don't care for the "View -> Headers -> All" menu item. But the backend functionality to send and get all headers is (currently) vital for Enigmail and Mnenhy.

My USD$0.02... The feature has been here for ages, and apparently other plugins (eg. Enigmail) use it - so keep it. Hide it if you must, bury it deep, but keep it away from the novices, yet accessible via the geeks. No one gets harmed. My gripe with View Headers is the fact that it's either always on or always off. If you're going to do this by folder, a sensible(?) idea might be to set it as an option for the junk folder, and integrate that option with junk mail controls. More useful for me, personally, would be to open a message in it's own window, and turn headers on for that ONE mail message. But when I close it out and return to other email (either in the "preview" pane or it's own window) header mode remains off. The suggestion would be to modify header mode options: Old: All -> Always View Headers New: -> This Message Only Old: Off -> Never View Headers (wording subject to change, milage may vary) If you're going to fix anything with header mode (though by the fact that this bug has been open for almost 2 yrs now?? I doubt it--yes, I'm feeling cynical today) - make it so that I can select and copy the entire headers with header mode on. Not just one line at a time. Yes, I can do it from view source, but if I have headers on to view them, don't make me open another window just to copy/paste them. Forcing the user to open more windows, do more work, will only discourage them from doing the necessary work to report spam [No, I'm not blaming Mozilla's usability for spam HAHAHA]

(In reply to comment #16) > More useful for me, personally, would be to open a message in it's own window, > and turn headers on for that ONE mail message. But when I close it out and > return to other email (either in the "preview" pane or it's own window) header > mode remains off. That is (sort of) how the Brief (one-line) header mode behaves, currently: If you select Brief headers (using the twisty in the envelope panel) in a standalone window, it doesn't affect the 3pane's preview at all; however, all subsequent standalone windows within the session continue to display headers according to that last selection made in a standalone. On restarting Mozilla, the initial state of both window types is set to whichever selection was most recently made (in either 3pane or standalone); if you make a change in the 3pane before opening a standalone, then the standalone follows that selection. (In reply to comment #15) > See, I don't care for the "View -> Headers -> All" menu item. > But the backend functionality to send and get all headers is (currently) > vital for Enigmail and Mnenhy. I certainly wouldn't advocate removing the backend functionality -- that would cause filters to stop being useful as well.

Suggested alternate solution: Leave the menu option in place, but (for the benefit of non-technical users who have no idea what "message source" might be) cause this option to invoke the functionality now produced by "View -> Message Source". This allows intuitive menuing of the feature, while resolving both this bug, and bug 151831, all without rewriting a significant hunk of code. Sounds like the best of both worlds, only without the Borg.

Um no. Removing a feature because something else broke it does not sound like a legitimate solution to me. I think the better idea here is to fix the bugs that make view all headers not work correctly. It's really nice that some people are of the opinion that viewing all headers is not useful. Everyone has an opinion. I don't really find Danielle Steele novels very useful either, but I don't campaign to have them removed from the book store. Is there something that viewing all headers breaks that you want fixed?

I'm not sure why I was notified about this header discussion today, but the ability to display brief, more and all headers was a big selling point leading me to prefer Netscape's email module to Outlook Express. A header display that can scroll vertically and horizontally if needed to display the headers would be nice. Imperfectly displaying all headers appears to average users to be a bug. I was happy with the old Netscape practice (3.x? 4.x?) of including headers in the body window of a message, instead of putting them into a separate display box that at times isn't adequate to display all headers. That also left a larger window for displaying the message, once the headers were scrolled out of sight. Pardon the nostalgia. The choice of brief, normal and all headers is a reasonable option to give users. The convenience of how to switch between header views is a concern. The current widget to display headers or not is a two-state toggle. A widget that could cycle through all the header choices would be quick and easy: none, normal, all and back to none in three clicks in the same place would have advantages for a user, though a three-state toggle instead of a two-state toggle would take a trifle of learning. Does Mozilla/Firefox have any 3-state toggles?

While I do see how such a feature would be handy, let's do a reality check here. Let's examine my setup -- cable ISP, I check my mail via POP. However, since I'm getting tons of spam (literally, over half my mail's spam) and Mozilla's Junk feature is only a Bayesan solution (a different bug for some enhancements), I now run all my email through... SpamAssassin. Therefore, my setup (for information purposes of my point) requires me to do this: 1. Run fetchmail to pull all my email and run it through my local postfix setup. 2. postfix runs procmail, which runs SpamAssassin, and then delivers to my local INBOX. 3. Mozilla occasionally checks this INBOX via POP on localhost. Did I mention I'm all Linux? Whatever Spamassasin doesn't catch, Mozilla does. None the less, let's open up one caught email, activate all headers... um... all headers? ALL OF THE HEADERS? Okay, Mozilla's choping off the lines, because I know one header fills eight 80 column lines. Let us continue on despite this. Taking a screenshot of this, and measuring the number of pixels in Gimp, such a display is... 270 pixels large (on a 144 dpi display, 9pt Helvetica). 15 headers are displayed. If I showed this on my 800x600 90dpi laptop, I would have to open the email into it's own window. I now know why laptop screens are 1240x1024 -- you need that much length just to see all headers and the email at the same time w/o viewing source. I think I'm now glad that it is chopping off the lines -- I wouldn't be able to see the content of the email with all the headers viewing everything like that.

The large size of a full header display is why a related enhancement request is that the header field have horizontal and vertical scroll bars if needed. Nevertheless, full headers should mean just that---truth in advertising, you know.

Shouldn't this be resolved Won't Fix?

As it is, All Headers mode is embarrassingly unusable; but then this is Seamonkey, where unusual standards of usability apply. Anyway, maybe if All Headers was removed, someone would get around to fixing bug 9942.

For those who don't know that it used to work fine pre-mozilla/5.0, here's one reason why I still use Netscape 3 for most email. Get rid of ugly Outbreak Excess/Outhouse-style chrome message headers entirely, at least via a pref if not outright, and you solve both this bug and bug 9942 .

What would be the point of a fixed bug 9942 without view all headers? That's the whole reason for fixing 9942. Without all headers turned on, scrolling headers are not an issue.

This bug here is WONTFIX for SeaMonkey, and we'll go for bug 9942 this very year. (Hey, I'd have liked to WONTFIX this 3 years ago! *g*)

I'll be glad if it was a compile-time option for Thunderbird. Why have that bloat when you have View Source?

> Why have that bloat when you have View Source? Because you can turn it off. Does it bother you that other people are able to use View All Headers or something? This is a feature that doesn't have to be used. It seems as though those who want it removed are really more concerned with preventing others from using it. It doesn't cost you anything to have the feature there, what is the problem? If you don't find it useful, try your best not to turn it on and do your best to sleep at night despite the fact that other people might be using View All Headers.