send unsent messages without attachments first

[Chandan Prakash]

hello community,

While traveling on a plane, I check my downloaded emails and may reply/send many emails.  Some are brief, others have large attachments.
When I connect to a mobile network with low data rate, T'bird tries to deliver the emails in Outbox in chronological order.  If the first on happens to be a low-priority email with a large attachment, it may take a very long time or even timeout.  Short high-priority emails later in the Outbox are blocked.

How to resolve the issue?

If some add -on is there , please let me know.

I am also ready to build a new add-on for this , or adding this to send_later add-on . Please help me get started .

If somehow , we manage to put emails in such order that email without attachments are sent first from outbox, that is they are placed before in outbox , it will be great. 

[Jonathan Kamens]

Send Later puts messages into the Outbox and then tells Thunderbird to deliver the messages from the Outbox. At that point the order of delivery is completely out of Send Later's hands: delivery is handled entirely by Thunderbird.

I suppose you might be able to write an add-on which changes the behavior of Thunderbird to sort messages in the Outbox by size before sending any of them, but I think that's separate from Send Later.

A related issue is the fact that if a message in the Outbox fails to send for whatever reason and an error dialog pops up, delivery from the Outbox stops entirely until the user clicks the OK button on the pop-up, which is really sub-optimal. There has been an open bug about this in the Thunderbird bug database for many years, but no one has gotten around to fixing it.

I suppose it could theoretically be possible for Send Later to detect when multiple messages are about to be moved into the Outbox and move the smaller ones first, but frankly that would significantly increase the complexity of the delivery code in the add-on, and I do not think this use case would be useful to enough people to justify the effort or added complexity.

I'd have to talk to the other maintainer who is about to take over primary maintenance of the add-on about whether he'd be willing to accept a pull request to add this functionality. Again, I'm not sure we would want to do it because of the added complexity and maintenance effort for the new code.

In any case, I wouldn't recommend doing it before the Thunderbird 78 version of the add-on is released, because the code is going to change very much in Thunderbird 78 so I think it's a bad idea to invest effort into implementing new functionality for the old code-base.

Regards,

Jonathan Kamens
Send Later Thunderbird Add-on
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