User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) Build Identifier: Mozilla 0.9 final I recently switched to Mozilla Thunderbird, whereas I first used the mail client 'The Bat!'. Thunderbird really is great, eapsecially because it's free and it's extendible. But there's one feature of The Bat! I really loved and desperately seek for in Thunderbird, that is: message composition using templates. So, instead of replying like it right now, you would have something like this: Hello %OFromFName, %ODateEn, %OTimeLongEn, you wrote: %Quotes %Cursor -- Best regards, %FromFName mailto:%FromAddr See http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/samples.html for more examples. Please note: of course it's an option whether you would choose to have the signature inserted below the template, or insert the signature into the template (not for The Bat!, but for Thunderbird). Implementing this suggestion would have major consequences, that's for sure. It would mean the default text when replying (on ... you wrote) becomes flexible, it means implementing a lot of variables, etc. But... there are many advantages. It would mean increased productivity, since you can insert the greeting of the message automatically (e.g. Hello %FName, Dear %Sex %Lastname, etc. etc.). If you make this system as advanced as in The Bat!, you would even be able to automatically decrease the message size. For example, look at Quick Template 7 at the referred web page to see how to quickly remove all nonsense when replying. And, one more important thing to highlight: it makes internationalization of the templates easily. Since every way of sending a message (new, reply, forward) is templated, adjusting the layout of all these messages is easy. So, local customs can be implemented at extremely high speed by the users themselves. Maybe Language Packs can do this automatically in the end.... Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.

Most template features that are not present would be Core/MailNews functionality, altho most of the existing RFE's about templates are entered as App Suite/MailNews bugs. Bug 21210 (which you already found) and bug 178263 in particular cover most of what's described here. See also bug 95284, bug 100467. Bug 262281, like this bug, are kind of superfluous given those others.

*** Bug 309655 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This feature would be more interesting if it possessed the capability of the end-user creating a special purpose parser plus template; the template language should allow both quick default display of parsed structures, as well as looping over sequences of parsed structures. I'm not sure about creation of a GUI for constructing that parser... Maybe highlight the part you want snabbed out, or use an interactive regexp tester that helps you learn to match things you want. Then make it easy to create a parser state machine with actions, perhaps the default action will be to simply fill up a data structure with the parsed information. That info can then be pulled back out for use by the template language. What I'm thinking is that such a thing could serve as part of or a basis for a SuperCite like interactive user interface for working with email citations in complex mailing-list forum discussions and other business discussions where correctly attributing quotations from the replied to email and/or to other emails. I'd like to be able to display an email in the main window while I'm composing one in the composer window. In that displayed email, I want to highlight part of it, then paste it into the one I'm writing. When that event occurs, I want it to re-wrap that pasted text, and put it into it's own paragraph with an attribution line at the top, in similar fashion to SuperCite, for GNU Emacs Gnus, VM, and other mail and news modes. I'd like the option of using a quotation format that has the person's name before the '>', like this: On 2008/04/18, Karl Hegbloom <Karl.Hegbloom@utah.edu> wrote: karlheg> This is the SuperCite quotation style. It should perform a parse of the quotation referenced email linkage structure through textual analysis / matching. Perhaps X-something headers could be added to the emails with message-id trees in some human readable and easy to mechanically parse representation. (Lisp sexps?) JSON? If it can edit the headers of emails stored in an IMAP store to cache that linkage information so that it does not need to be recomputed every time a compatible email reader starts up or opens an email from a mailing-list folder. That referenced email link structure can then be used by the user interface to provide the user with assistance in navigating the messages for review, and for visualizing the path and participation of the discussion through a graphical interdocument reference map. Since the quotations reference a particular part of another email, the links are not just to the top of the email being quoted from, but to the specific piece of that email being quoted in another later email. So, the linkage map should graphically point to the part of the referenced document from the part where it is being quoted. The thumbnail pages in the display should always be arranged in some ordering that makes sense as a visualization of chronologically ordered messages, yet also as a linkage between them based on citations of one email from another. I'm not sure what's best for that yet; maybe two different ways to organize the graph? Show by chronological ordering, topologically sorted by message send time. Show by citation structure, topologically sorted by what message is referenced by what other, like a project-planning graph, the internals of a Gannt chart. The second ordering will preserve the chronology of the message thread(s).

It would be cool if it could know to put "[...]" where text has been abridged, like if you paste in starting in the middle of a sentence or remove a block from the middle. It might also be useful to have an "ediff" like display; with it showing an email and the one it quotes.

Karl Hegbloom, the problem with complex regexps is that most mere mortals cannot understand them. Maybe having them as an option for deities would be a good idea, for a user oriented feature a more simple "replace tag with x" scheme might be better. I point to the example of AdBlock. It uses regexps internally but the UI has out of necessity (i.e. to avoid billions of forums posts along the lines of "how do i write a regexp for...") it has two much simpler interfaces that most people - a GUI and a simple "find in URL" search mode.

The main use I had for templates and macros in The Bat! was automatic replies to certain types of spam (mostly copies sent to abuse@ addresses) and the senders of chain letters. In both cases use of the template activated either manually or by complicated filters.