Re: Mailboxes behaviour

[patl phoenix volant org]

> If this is the case, there is something else to consider:
> Do we need the bars on the sides? Would it be better to just have all the
> tabs up to begin with?
> They could me made to order and put an icon on each tab...
> just some food for thaught....

I think a scrollable expanding list works better; especially for
cases with many mailboxes and mailboxes on different servers.
(For example, I have 45 IMAP mailboxes on my primary server, all
of which have mail delivered directly into them.  Add more servers,
admin accounts that don't forward, and shared mailboxes and the
list gets a bit long to fit all of the tabs.)

If we do keep tabs, putting them along the top or bottom (with
multiple rows if necessary) would wast much less space.


I'd go with a list that includes both the mailbox name and the
current total and unread message counts; with some icon/font/color
change to indicate whether the mailbox is currently open.

It should be fairly easy to keep the counts up to date for all
mailboxes on a given server.  The update frequency can be a
user config option in the preferences.  Or, better yet, a global
value with possible per-server overrides.

So there could be an implicit 'server open' when the first mailbox
for that server is opened, and an implicit close when that last
mailbox for it is closed.  Or we could provide some sort of explicit
server open/close so that the counts could be kept up to date without
opening a mailbox.  This might also be a per-server config option
with the choice of 'open whenever Balsa is running', 'open when any
mailbox on this server is open', or 'open manually'.


This touches on another issue.  It should be possible to define
multiple server entries for the same host but with different
authentication (username and password) info.  These would count
as separate servers in my discussion above.



-Pat