[enhancement] quick reply

[chrizilla]

A "quick reply" feature has been asked for by the community 20 years ago back in 2004 on BMO:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269857

This critical feature has never been implemented since.
Worse, the enhancement request was auto-closed 19 years ago ...

Many renowned webmail interfaces (Gmail, Live, ...) provide a quick reply functionality. It speeds up the workflow and as Fabian pointed out in the rationale for his request, it would help webmail users transition to Thunderbird:

making this feature out-of-the-box would be a plus for marketing it towards new users that would enjoy a free, fast and stable way of answering messages in a quick reply fashion. Some people comment on many message boards that they would rather use Gmail than a mail client because of the quick reply style "conversation" interface. Lets bridge the gap and offer new and older users another reason to choose Thunderbird for their mail needs.

I agree with Fabian, that the quick reply function should be implemented as a collapsable pane below the preview pane.

This has been a feature repeatedly requested by popular demand throughout the years. For example:
https://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=543166
https://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3062655
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1219046
https://www.thunderbird-mail.de/forum/thread/45105-quick-reply-f%C3%BCr-tb3-0-erledigt/

[Betterbird]

Technically this is not an easy task. It's a bit along the lines of composing in a tab (Issue #90). That stalled because a lot of things don't work when compose happens in a tab and not its own window. Most importantly "compose add-ons" won't work. It's questionable what people would expect to work in the "quick reply pane".

[chrizilla]

composing in a tab […] "compose add-ons" won't work.

This shouldn't be an isssue here.

what people would expect to work in the "quick reply pane".

It speeds up the workflow, as Fabian pointed out above:

users […] would enjoy a free, fast and stable way of answering messages in a quick reply fashion. Some people comment on many message boards that they would rather use Gmail than a mail client because of the quick reply style "conversation" interface. Lets bridge the gap and offer new and older users another reason to choose Thunderbird for their mail needs.

Clearly this would make Betterbird better.

[Betterbird]

This appears to be a bottomless pit: Is that reply or "reply all". How about adding CC or BCC? It that HTML or plaintext? With or without signature? That said, the most frequent question will be: And now that used "quick reply", why can't I see my reply in the conversation? (Because there is no conversation, unless you use "Open Message in Conversation").

Sure, a quick reply à la "Conversations" can be done, but without real conversations, that's just half the rent. And that there are a few very vocal proponents of the request doesn't mean that many user will be using it. The survey we did back in 2023 this wasn't requested. In TB, there aren't many votes or duplicates. If you compare that to other features, there are many more votes and duplicated, take for example regular expression search, a real geek feature with 112 votes and a bunch of duplicates. Not planned for now, but we can leave the ticke open.

It's more like a thing you'd do in an add-on.