Re: [Evolution-hackers] Status of mail-refactor-2 branch todo

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

Hi Brett,

On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 17:49, Brett Johnson wrote:
> /me notes that the CC list on this thread was getting rather large -- So
> I only replied to the list (I assume everyone on the CC list is on the
> list as well, right?)

Good call.  :-)

> Scenario 1) I get a *lot* of mail, and I use procmail to pre-sort it
> into 20-30 folders on the server (mailing lists, sysadmin stuff, spam,
> etc...).  Many times, I'll want to take a look in a particular folder,
> just to see if there are any interesting new threads -- I don't want to
> read the messages, or have any of them selected or marked read -- I just
> want to scan the subject lines.   Yet later, when I have more time, I'll
> want to read some of the mail in that folder (and I like to read mail in
> the preview pane BTW).  Automatically selecting the first unread message
> (and marking it read immediately, since that's how I set my preferences)
> every time I open said folder is going to get *really* irritating.

Yeah, I think I didn't take the "mark as read" side-effect into
account.  It turns out that you are right, and that I would be annoyed
by this behavior myself.  :)

(In addition to reading mail the way you do, I also tend to skim through
messages and keep them marked as unread so I can read them more
thoroughly later...  For this reason I always have a lot of old unread
messages; if Evolution automatically jumped the oldest of them and
marked it as read I'd probably be annoyed, and risk forgetting messages
that I want to read.)

Actually if I think about it, I believe my common pattern is actually to
scroll all the way down and see the most recent messages in the folder
first, no matter what.  I wonder if this is a common enough pattern that
it would make sense to just scroll all the way to the most recent
message whenever we open a folder?

(I think that's actually what Thunderbird does.  Apple Mail even sorts
mail in reverse time order by default, so the most recent messages are
always on top and don't require any scrolling.)

Alternatively, we could scroll to the oldest unread message as Mike
said, but I am not sure that actually makes it better -- in my specific
case at least I would still want to scroll to the bottom most of the
time anyways.

Sounds like it would be interesting to do some user testing and see how
people actually read their mail...  (Also I am sure we discussed this
before...  I should look it up.)

-- Ettore