[dev] Forward message with separate attachments

[Michael M Slusarz]

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck at horde.org>:

> No argument with that.
>
> Back to the original discussion, I don't think the abstract concept  
> of what a "forward" is matters to people. The fact that forwarding  
> an email message conceptually means sending it as-is to another  
> person doesn't matter, if what people want the button labeled  
> "forward" to do is actually "reply to this message with a different  
> quoting style, preserving attachments, and let me edit it, add  
> commentary, and remove some of the attachments".

Except my user expectation is different.  Forward to me means to send  
the entire message to a new set of users.

To me this is more intuitive in a real-world sense.  For example, I  
receive a hard-copy document from a co-worker that I want to forward  
to other co-workers.  When I do this I might attach a sticky to the  
front of the document saying something like "give me your thoughts on  
this".  But the expectation is that the forwarded copy is otherwise  
identical to the original copy I received.

On the other hand, if I go through the document and make a bunch of  
edits/changes/adds, or I only send a portion of the original document  
to my other co-workers, this is no longer "forwarding" the document.   
Instead, it is an edited version, and I am distributing an entire new  
entity.

I can see the benefit of the latter, although I strongly disagree that  
this should be called Forwarding a message.  A better term might be  
"Edit as New" (this is what Thunderbird uses) or something similar.  I  
would not be against implementing this (I have thought about this in  
the past), although I worry that its inclusion might clutter the UI.   
I guess it could live as a totally separate option under Forward.

michael

___________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz at horde.org]