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TheRupp
Strollin' around
Status: In development

Hello,

I was very surprised that Thunderbird does not offer an option to show the e-mail-adress of the sender in a column in the table (like the columns "From" and "Correspondents"). This new column would be very useful to quickly identify spam/junk e-mails.

This feature can be added with add-ons:

This feature seems very basic and simple and like it should not require an add-on.

If you do a Google search for this feature, then you find many people, who have asked for this feature for many years.

140 Comments
gulfstreme
New member

The lack of this option only benefits spammers and scammers.

ChrisRo
New member

Best said with "This feature seems very basic and simple and like it should not require an add-on."
Sadly, all Addons that were out there are not functional any more with the newest version.

Please add this feature, it's a basic security issue.

pippo
New member

The add-ons shown here no longer work with the latest Thunderbird updates!!!

DRocket
Making moves

Here's my solution. I use TypeApp as an email app on my android phone. I now read my emails from that app, rather than reading my emails on my desktop. TypeApp has two ways to display emails. The alternative is just one line. With this you can select to view the details of the sender without opening the emails with this option. Now I check my emails this way, no matter whether I am at home or away from home. I like TypeApp very much, have used for a long time. It can manage multiple email addresses and you can select Unified to get all the emails at once. Once I know the sender's email address, I can then compose my response in Thunderbird. TypeApp is like Yoda, small enough to carry around on my back and smart enough to keep me safe.

EvilImps
Strollin' around

Can't comment on whether or not there are security benefits, I just find it incredibly silly that such a basic feature requires so much effort to get implemented.

It's already there in the message pane header, why do we need to argue so much to get it in the more convenient location of the message list?

Danylo
Strollin' around

Does Thunderbird love SPAM?

sqwertz
New member

Yes, please forgawdsakes!  I just posted the same request overt on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/18mk62c/where_does_tb_get_its_from_and_correspondents/

It's ridiculous we can't make our own informed decisions because you conveniently obscure the most important details from us because we're all idiots!   Every email client has always shown the complete From: header. Which has now been removed from TB. WTF?   Stop trying to outsmart us for our own good!

boop
New member

Yes, please.  A column with the email address of the sender when viewing the message list would be very welcome, for the reasons that many others have given in this thread.

justauser
New member

For security reasons is showing the real sender email in a seprate column essenitial!

Please implement this feature as soon as possible!

IGMartin
Making moves

In the previous version (114) at least you could click once on the message and it displayed - on the bottom of the screen - the url address. Now, you have to double click to open the message to see the sender url. The ideal behavior would be having a column displaying the sender url, with no clicking involved. any suspicious, or not wanted message could be just selected and deleted. 

IGMartin
Making moves

Also, the add-ons don't work anymore with version 115!

 

staples1347
New member

I was just reading this thread and found out about Betterbird which sounds like it might already have something like the feature listed below.

As a sysadmin who also does coding (mainly on Gentoo Linux), the recent Thunderbird update has also been causing problems for me for both going through server emails and spam emails.  So I decided to see if I could create a patch to add the feature as listed on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243258 : Show email address in message list.

The patch, posted as Matthew Stapleton, adds a new option: "Show email addresses in email columns" in Settings, General which enables displaying the email address in addition to the email name in the From, Recipient, and Correspondents columns.  If you also have the "Show only display name for people in my address book" option enabled and the email address is in your Address Book, that option will override this new option at the moment.

I'm not a Mozilla Developer, but it was fairly straight forward to implement this, although I didn't implement a unit test or non-English translations.  Adding additional columns might be a bit more complicated as well.

Also, it looks like the full-addresses column addon might be able to work again soon: https://github.com/lkosson/full-address-column/issues/14

 

sqwertz
New member

I need to be able to sort by the From: header.  Just seeing "Customer Service" or "No Reply" and then having to wade through all those usually cryptic subjects is a total PITA. 

And it is a security and spam risk, especially for those who render the full message as soon as the message is clicked in the header/list pane:   Bingo!!!  Spam Hell and potential exploits await you for an eternity!

Its' like the developers are totally clueless about these things.  As somebody has just proven on a fork, the change was trivial yet it's taken up thousands of hours of user's time and feature-requests to get a 30-minute code change, testing, and submitted.

TheRupp
Strollin' around

I think @staples1347  's comment is very good.
The mentioned bug on bugzilla (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243258 = "Show email address in message list") currently only has 15 "votes" (votes are at the very top of the website hidden by default under "Details"). I guess it would help if more people (including people from this thread) would also "vote" for this bug.

Achim_Motzi
New member

currently only has 15 "votes" (votes are at the very top of the website hidden by default under "Details")

Thank you for this hint. I voted immediately as I used the now not-working "Full address column" and without this feature, it's a risk to open mails as spammers and phishers send mails usually with a well-known display name.

So showing the sender's "real address" should be a built-in function in these unsecure days.