Re: Writing a GNOME mail client.

[Carl Nygardlocalhost <cnygard bellatlantic net>]

David Warnock wrote:  (a while ago)
> 
> Kris,
> 
> > One concept that I would more than love to see in such a mail client is
> > the seperation of the "read" status and "done" status of messages. What I
> > mean is that many mail programs let you highlight unread messages, or file
> > read messages away, but what I really need is some sort of flag that gets
> > set only when I'm done whatever action that email requires (a reply,
> > usually).
> 
> Better would be a choice of whether to default to needing action or not. You
> also need to be able to set this manually (or even better by a rule).
> 
> If setting it maually then an action by date/time would also be good.


Perhaps we could have a configurable "cascade" of states, each state
linked to an action, and also toggle-able by mouse click (similar to
what happens in Quicken, when reconciling, if you're familiar).

For example, states read, replied, filed:  with each being tied to
the corresponding action.  Each action performed clears a bit in the
state.  Display of the icon is determined by the highest set bit. 
Clicking on the icon clears the current state, and proceeds to the next
uncleared bit.  Clicking on the end-state icon sets all bits, thereby
cycling through all states again.

I know this is more implementation-discussion than feature-discussion,
but I'm just trying to illustrate the operation.  If some mail message
doesn't need to be filed, the state reminder is still available, but
easy to toggle off by hand. It also keeps track of operations performed
out-of-order relative to the states.

It should also be easy to pre-set the states based on some pattern
match.  And if you follow this implementation, you'll see that the state
works automatically even during automated operations by setting the
proper state bit upon filing.  No worries.

Also, I'd like to reiterate an idea posted a while back that seemed like
such an elegant solution (that was actually implemented) to the
filtering problems (at least client-side).  Someone mentioned a project
that created a mailer whose folders were defined by regular
expressions.  Filtering was defined as "What messages meet this regex?"
instead of "When receiving mail, go through the list of criteria, and
the assign message to first folder that matches".  This implies that a
message can appear in more than one folder, if it meets those regex
requirements.  Also, searching through your body of email for something
is simply: write a regex and check what pops into the folder.  

And I'd be willing to help implement this stuff (provided I have the
free time).

Regards,
Carl