Onno Ekker [:nONoNonO UTC+1] Reporter
	Description • 16 years ago

I reply to e-mail both in English (mostly mozilla/extension related e-mail) and Dutch (work, private e-mail). It would be nice to have localized variants of the header prefs, for instance mailnews.reply_header_wrote.en-US and mailnews.reply_header_wrote.nl, and mailnews would switch between them depending of the language of the received e-mail (if that's possible at all) or the current language the spelling checker is configured to, with a fallback to the existing prefs. This would allow to easily get "On 01-01-2007 11:00 AM, Alf Aardvark wrote: " for English e-mail and "Op 01-01-2007 11:00 schreef Alf Aardvark: " for Dutch e-mail.

	rsx11m
	Comment 1 • 16 years ago

An auto-detect may be possible with the automatic language detection for the spell checker proposed in bug 69687, so this would certainly be helpful for users in a multi-lingual environment (with a possible ambiguity if multiple languages are present in the message). Such an effort would have to be coordinated with any customization or templating of the reply headers, e.g., as proposed in bug 107884 and its dependencies. Similarly, locale-specific customization of the forwarding headers may be considered.

	rsx11m
	Comment 2 • 16 years ago

Sounds useful, no existing bug found, thus confirming [Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1a2pre) Gecko/20080820005835 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre].

I've changed this from Localization to Internationalization as it involves code for the backend to make Localization of these headers possible.

	HHahn
	Comment 3 • 16 years ago

I fully agree with mr. Ekker. I even write in three languages (Dutch, English and German).

I already posted several comments on this topic in bug 107884. That bug was entered in October 2001. Until the end of 2001, there where 53 comments. Until the end of 2005, there were 75 comments. Then it was taken up again in 2007.

From remarks made at some other bug threads, I understand that the policy is to consider a bug report as "not urgent" when there haven't been reactions for three months or so. But this item is *not* a bug report but rather a feature request!

As it pops up time and again, there is nore demand for it that seems to have been understood by the Thunderbird team so far.

I would like to emphasise again that in e-mailing there is a fundamtneal difference between the user interface language and the message language. The message language can be totally different from the UI language (which, in turn, needs not be the same as the OS locale language). See bug 107884 comments 68 and 78-80.

There is indeed a need for a functionality to have the user specify is own reply header texts. He should even be given the possibility to define multiple texts, as he may spaek and write more than one language.

Note that Thunderbird already has a functionality to add user-defined texts (e.g. as signatures). This function could be used for reply headers too if only it would allow using parameters that are automatically replaced by the relevant information (sender's name and e-mail address, date and time, etc.) from the e-mail message that is being replied to.
For an example, see  the Courier e-mail client (freely available from
http://www.rosecitysoftware.com/Courier/). Unfortunately, Rose City decided to discontinue development work on Courier. It has some limitations (like not supporting Unicode, HTML e-mail, and some similar things), that is why I stopped using it. However, it is an extremely stable programme.

I repeat: Please DO NOT conclude that this is a low-priority issue if nobody reacts for a couple of months. We have asked the question and we cannot do more that that, except for repeating it again and again.