Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Avatar for Username

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

This thread was archived. Please ask a new question if you need help.

Start as new mail/thread, when replying to an email in a thread?

  • 2 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 17 views
  • Last reply by sdaau

sdaau
sdaau
more options

Usually, I have my messages displayed in a threaded view.

Officially, I should start a new email by hitting "Write", and then selecting an email address from the address book - however, many times, it is very much easier to select an email in a thread, and hit Reply to start a new mail to the respective recipient, especially if it is a group of recipients.

However, if I reply to a message from a thread, that means my email will also inherit the Message-Id:, In-Reply-To:, and References: headers, which are used for threading - and when the recipients eventually reply to me, they return back similar headers, and so their responses end in the old thread, even if I intended to start a new thread and thus chose a new email title.

Is there a facility or addon for Thunderbird, so that if I reply to a message from a thread, I could click a button like "Start as new thread", in which case the old In-Reply-To: and References: headers will be deleted, and in that sense, a new thread will be started?

Usually, I have my messages displayed in a threaded view. Officially, I should start a new email by hitting "Write", and then selecting an email address from the address book - however, many times, it is very much easier to select an email in a thread, and hit Reply to start a new mail to the respective recipient, especially if it is a group of recipients. However, if I reply to a message from a thread, that means my email will also inherit the Message-Id:, In-Reply-To:, and References: headers, which are used for threading - and when the recipients eventually reply to me, they return back similar headers, and so their responses end in the old thread, even if I intended to start a new thread and thus chose a new email title. Is there a facility or addon for Thunderbird, so that if I reply to a message from a thread, I could click a button like "Start as new thread", in which case the old In-Reply-To: and References: headers will be deleted, and in that sense, a new thread will be started?

All Replies (2)

christ1
christ1
  • Top 25 Contributor
more options

Right-click the message - Edit As New Message I'm not sure if that resets the Message ID though. Give it a try.

sdaau
sdaau Question owner
more options

Thanks for that, @christ1 - good idea, unfortunately that doesn't work; one problem is that you cannot really see headers in Thunderbird when writing a message (when you're reading, at least you have Ctrl-U for view message source), and I even installed the Header Tools Lite addon to help with this - but neither that addon offers any facilities to inspect or edit headers in a Write Email window. Another problem is that when you do "Edit as New", the original contents don't get quoted the way they do when you hit Reply, but that is a minor issue (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-Shift-O solves it).

So I tried one mail in a thread with "Edit as New", changed the title, sent it to myself - and while other headers may have been cleaned, the `References:` header is still there, containing IDs of every previous message in the conversation - which means, even if this reply has a distinct enough title, it still gets threaded with the old thread, which is what I wanted to avoid.

So, this question is still open - any other suggestions?

As a sub-question, any add-ons out there that will let you see/edit headers of a Write Email window?

EDIT: Related:

Modified by sdaau