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Inbox Threads..

An idea for a Thunderbird add-on came to me today. I was going to call it "Threads", or perhaps "Inbox Threads"; not that I plan on writing any such thing; hoping instead to persuade someone else that it is a Very Good Idea, and leave it at that.

However, it seems it's not my idea; not that one can own ideas; rather, it seems somone else has not only thought of it, but imlemented it, though sadly not on Thunderbird. A quick Google brought up this..

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Collected_User_Requests

The item is entitled "Search over all folders", and describes some of what Opera M2 Mail can do, which is, in fact, a lot more than what I'm after.

What I want, is simply to have my inbox linked to my Sent box, so that I can view both sides of a conversation, threaded, in one place; i.e. my inbox; the outgoing mails from my Sent box forming "ghost" entries in the tree.

It would be very, very nifty, and handy, of course.
I know this, because I already have it.

*Splutter* WHAT?

Yes, I know I said that Thunderbird doesn't have this, but it is, in fact, quite simple to achieve a similar, even better effect with any old inbox. I'd wager your current email client can do it right now. It's called..

Automatic bcc!

I enabled this on a Thunderbird mail account a couple of years ago for some particular test, and when I realized how handy it was, I left it enabled. bcc, as you will probably know, means "Blind Carbon Copy", and enables you to cc messages to someone without anyone else (either the original To: or cc: recipients) knowing about it. Bcc gets used inside organizations during covert political manoueverings, and now has another use!

This yet-to-be-written plugin will also allow you to make a multiple selection encompassing the entire thread (regardless of the sent mail's physical existence in a separate folder) and drop the whole lot into another folder, job done.

I'm not certain if Opera Mail can do this, because I've not seen it, but my current Thunderbird setup certainly does, and I regularly archive whole conversations this way; my Sent folder isn't opened from one month to the next, unused.

Those bcc's automatically form the sent half of my email archive, and always land exactly where they are supposed to; inside the threaded conversation, and at least structurally, everything makes sense.

Now, I hear you saying, "Haha! cor! You obviously don't realize that you can place a copy of outgoing mails in whatever folder you want, even the inbox!". Ahh, but I do. It's a trick that you can pull off in quite a few mail clients. But there is one crucial difference between all these other approaches, and mine..

With my system, I get to know if the mail was ACTUALLY SENT!*

By the way, if you write plugins for Thunderbird/Firefox, mail me; I've got loads of plugin ideas I'd rather not code.

for now..

;o)
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