Ability to edit an email

Greg 2017-07-14 01:09:17 UTC #1

I am repeating a feature request I mentioned a long time ago for WT4.

Ability to edit an email.
eg. Right-click email, choose EDIT. Then be able to edit text in body, remove some or all attachments, then SAVE.

If there is already a way to do this that I have missed, please tell me how.

gabriele_bulfon (gabriele_bulfon) 2017-07-14 07:20:20 UTC #2

You can right-click on the message row and select “open as new”, then you can save it as draft.
This was available on WT4 too for ages.

Saving directly on the original email is not a good choice, for email tracking e.g. via message-id, infact imap protocol has no action for saving on the email, but just in case deleting and adding a new one.

Gabriele

Greg 2017-07-17 01:15:06 UTC #3

Thanks Gabriele.

I never knew about that after asking when I first used WT4 but I’ll use it now. The only setback is that it puts my email address as the “from” address in the saved draft. It would be nice to have a way to keep the sender’s address because that’s what I would probably search by if I was looking for something in the future.

Anyway, it’s much better that what I was (wasn’t) doing before now.

gabriele_bulfon (gabriele_bulfon) 2017-07-17 08:50:43 UTC #4

At the moment, “Open as new” was intended to “keep content, but change sender and destinations”.
May be nice to allow for a “Edit as is”

To get the same behavior now, you can drag/copy (drag with ctrl pressed) the email onto drafts, and open it with a double click from there: it will keep everything as is.

Gabriele

Greg 2017-07-17 23:12:12 UTC #5

Maybe I’m doing something wrong Gabriele, but doing that I get exactly the same result.

Once the email is opened in drafts (as new so it can be edited), on saving, it has my email as the sender, not the original sender.

gabriele_bulfon (gabriele_bulfon) 2017-07-18 06:11:53 UTC #6

Oh yes, the sender is changed…obviously it’s considered your draft.
But it should keep recipients, though

Greg 2017-07-27 22:26:59 UTC #7

Thanks Gabriele,

I’ve tried various methods but I think some sort of “edit in place” (as you put it earlier) would be a nice feature - even if the process created a copy (so it doesn’t mess up the original message-id etc).

We did this in the past because I tell our staff (and myself) to keep mailbox size down by removing attachments (sometimes move to nas, etc). But quite often you want to keep the email trail (body) and maybe add a note what you did with the attachments - as well as keeping the sender (for searching in the future). Then you could just drag the new (edited) email to some other folder if required.

We used to do this in M$ outlook but I’m not sure how outlook achieved it behind the scenes.

pike (Michael Kicks) 2017-07-28 07:36:31 UTC #8

Some questions for @Greg.
Which is an average size of file that you are removing?
Which is currently the mailbox size and the size of your data-volumes?

How old are the disks?

And one for @gabriele_bulfon: should be that bad idea a command for remove attachments from the email?

Greg 2017-08-15 00:17:10 UTC #9

We would just remove any attachments that are not required or already saved elsewhere (eg. NAS). Usually anything greater than about 1 or 2mb.

We have about a dozen users with most having a 2gb quota and a few 5gb quota.

Nethserver running on a vm.

An example would be a large upcoming job where someone may send a heap of plans (eg. 10mb total). We would be saving them elsewhere anyway (shared NAS storage that gets backed up daily), but may want to keep the “thread” of the email conversation in the long term without the 10mb of attachments.