Re: [Evolution] vfolders vs filters

[Ryan Heise <ryan whitewolf com au>]

NotZed wrote:

> Filtering can do other things that vfoldering can't, and vfoldering
> can cover multiple folders and sources whereas filtering is just incoming
> mail.

I don't see the point of having real folders any more once you have
vfolders. Sure, the current vfolder implementation doesn't allow you to
do some things that folders/filters can do, but you should be able to
get the same effect with vfolders by being able to assign arbitrary
attributes to emails, something I've talked about on this list before.
Suppose you have a filter that puts certain emails in a folder called
"evolution-list". You could achieve the same thing with vfolders by
defining a filter that assigns a "evolution-list" attribute to those
emails instead of "physically" moving those emails into a folder. Then
you could construct a query based on that attribute. This way, an email
isn't limited to being in one folder. The power of vfolders is that an
email can belong to multiple folders. There is no reason to retain the
old concept of having physical folders that force an email to have a
single parent, except maybe that it is a cheap way to get certain
functionality that vfolders does not yet provide. But you could achieve
this functionality with vfolders by extending it as described above.

For more information on this idea, please refer to my earlier post
called "VFolder wishlist" which tries to describe some of the different
ways I'd like to query emails, and how you would go about using VFolders
to support all of those things.

> Wait till we also get scoring in there ...

What is scoring?

Thanks.

-- 
Ryan Heise

http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~rheise/