Edit Email Subject (EES)

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by sylerner on Feb. 22, 2016 · permalink

Using this add-on with Thunderbird 38.6.0 on openSUSE Linux does not get along with IMAP access to Gmail.

I've enabled Googles "Access for less secure apps" to that IMAP is still able to work.

I tried using this extension both with and without "Only local changes (will only change local Thunderbird index database)" enabled.

In both cases, editing an initially blank subject generated a new copy of the email on gmail. However, in both cases the subject line was still blank. (The email had a PDF attachment, if that matters.)

An interesting side note: When viewing the new copies of the original message via gmail.com, the displayed date was unchanged from the original. However, when looking at the inbox message list, the message thread (the new copies are threaded onto the original) shows the date and time of when the subject was edited!

The only clue I have is that when I look at the headers there is an "X-EditEmailSubject:" tag with the datestamp of when the subject was edited. This may be a false lead, as gmail could be dating the new message internally from when it was inserted via IMAP.

If I only needed the edited subject to show up in Thunderbird this wouldn't matter. But since also access my email via my phone and on other PCs, I really need the change to propagate back to Google.

The need to edit the subject line of existing messages is often critical, and this extension should be a standard part of Thunderbird. It's a shame the gmail doesn't seem to get along with this at the moment.