Comment 26 for bug 490935

C'm on Guys!

Is this really a chat thread for developers or just time capitalists that don't
know what else to do with their time? How hard can it be to realize the benefits
to the users this feature would bring?

The only blocker for this enhancement that I can see here is prestige. There has
not been presented one single rational argument to not implement this during one
year of ongoing discussion. There is no technical one - at least none I'm aware
of. Please prove me being wrong here.

Once a user has recieved a message, it's up to the user to decide what (s)he
wants to do with the message. Delete it, edit it or whatever. (S)he must take
take the consequenses of it anyway. If the sender wants to safeguard that the
"intellectual" contents of the message is not altered without being able to
prove that, then (s)he should choose to sign the message (or encrypt it), either
using S/MIME, PGP/MIME, or plain PGP.

None of the techniques above will become broken by changing the Subject Text of
the message. I've just verified that for all the six possibilities. Works like a
charm in Mozilla 1.5.

Another, at least as I see it, rational reason to allow changing the subject,
that has not been mentioned on this tread before, is the one that I reported
yesterday as Bug 229222 (and redirected to this thread).

For your convinience I include it here too:

Some of my mail forwarding services have started to "play" with spam
notification filters which, e.g. prepend "*** SPAM ***" to the subject line.
Unfortunately this once in a while gets added to the subject line of mails that
I receive from mailing lists. This, of course, breaks the sorting of mails by
"thread", and I thus have to manually open the Mail Folder with my Editor,
search for that particular mail and edit the subject back to it's original. I
don't see any reason to not allow this to be done via the Subject line of the
Header Pane in the Mail Viewer. And to my knowledge this shouldn't affect
signed/encrypted mail either.

This would also be useful when for changing an "internationalized" Reply Prefix
e.g. the Swedish "SV:" to the more common "Re:" which gets posted now an then to
 mailing lists where mainly english is spoken/written.

./.

This was annoying in Netscape, in Mozilla even more. Why?
Well, in Netscape one could switch to another folder during the edit, but in
Mozilla that isn't enough. One has to exit Mozilla and reenter, otherwise
something gets messed up and every mail is shown twice in the Mail Pane of the
Main Mail Window after the edit. Not to mention that, one will loose all labels
assigned to mails before the manual edit.

Concerning where to store the edited Subject Text; the answer is simple - in the
header of the mail. How should I otherwise, i.e. if that text has been stored in
the .msf file, be able to see that change when accessing my mail via my web-mail
client instead of via Mozilla (IMAP)? If you, for some reason, want to store the
original Subject Text somewhere, that's all right with me. Even in that .msf
file. I certainly do not care. But I'd suggest to add a new property header like
"X-[Mozilla-]Original-Subject: ..." to the message header (if there doesn't
exist another commonly agreed upon header for that purpose already).

Concerning the message flag and labels; the decision to store them in the .msf
file is in my opinion, at least so far, a huge misstake. BTW I'm not sure the
message flag *is* stored in the .msf as they survive a rebuild where the labels
get lost. I'm quite sure theyre stored in the "X-Mozilla-Status*: ..." header (
but please don't trust me on this one though without first verifying this ;-) )

If there still is some reason, that I still don't see, for not making a feature
like this available to some users, I suggest to at least allow others to switch
it on by setting a property via the 'about: config' command.

Now, one final question:

Considering all the benefits a little feature like this would offer - how could
I resist to wote for this tiny but tremendously useful enhancement for Mozilla?

/ Friend of Mozilla