Mailbox view should identify encrypted messages

[uxfail]

It would significantly improve user experience and reduce user confusion if the mailbox view could indicate which messages contain PGP encryption.

This feature would be very useful because the Thunderbird search function is unable to search the contents of PGP encrypted messages, therefore, when searching, the user needs to manually search each PGP message.  Unfortunately, it is currently not possible for the user to manually search each PGP message because the mailbox view does not indicate which e-mails are PGP encrypted.

This feature request could be accomplished by adding an "Encrypted" column to the mailbox view, which, similar to the "Attachments" column, would display a "padlock" icon next to any encrypted message.

A different way to implement this feature request would be to improve the existing "Attachments" column so that the "Attachments" column would display a "question mark" icon next to any encrypted message.  Currently the "Attachments" column incorrectly reports all encrypted messages as not containing attachments regardless of if the encrypted message actually contains an attachment or not.  A "question mark" icon would correctly indicate that the "Attachments" column does not know if the encrypted message contains an attachment.  While such a "question mark" icon would be an improvement because it would identify nearly all encrypted messages, it would not identify all encrypted messages because it would be technically possible (though unlikely) for an e-mail to be PGP encrypted while simultaneously containing an unencrypted attachment.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[uxfail]

I did find a workaround whereby already existing features can be used to automatically separate all encrypted messages from your non-encrypted messages.  After you separate encrypted messages into their own folder, then you can more easily manually open each encrypted message in your search for a specific message.

* Create a new folder named "PGP".  This is the folder into which you will move all of your sent encrypted messages.
* When searching your Sent mailbox, create a custom header named "Content-Type".
* Search for all messages in the mailbox with "Content-Type" containing the word "encrypted".  The search results will find all of your sent encrypted messages.
* Move all of these found messages to a new folder.  In this example, I have moved all my sent encrypted messages to a folder named "PGP".
* Now you can open the mailbox view of the PGP folder, and you can now manually search through each of your sent encrypted messages.
* When moving messages, be careful to first verify that all of the messages you are about to move are messages that are located in the folder you expect.  If you are not careful, you could accidentally move messages from both your Sent folder and your Inbox folder.  This could cause you some confusion and inconvenience if you accidentally move messages from both of these folders into the same folder.  Typically you might want to keep Inbox messages and Sent messages in separate folders.