[Evolution] VFolder wishlist

[Ryan Heise <ryan whitewolf com au>]

I have been experimenting with evolution-mail's VFolders. I figured a
good test would be to see if it can emulate my netscape-mail folder
structure. My netscape mail folders are mostly of three types:

- messages from a particular mailing list
- discussions with particular people or groups of people
- emails related to ongoing projects (eg. work)

I was able to emulate the first nicely, the second sort of, and the
third not at all (my goal is to use VFolders, not actual folders).

The second could be achieved with a more powerful expression syntax (ie.
allowing "or" as well as "and", and allowing subexpressions), but a
shortcut option would be nice too (like the To-and-CC shortuct).

The third might be implemented by allowing users to assign arbitrary
attributes to emails (manual filing) and then filtering based on those
attributes. That might be tricky to implement but I think it would be
very useful.

While VFolders can't match my netscape mail folders exactly (unless you
can assign arbitrary attributes),  I understand there is a lot of
potential to provide features netscape can't provide (particularly,
overlapping views). In this area, I'd like to be able to filter based on
additional criteria:

- emails sent within a certain time period
- unread/new emails.
- unreplied emails.

In addition, for any VFolder I'd like to be able to easily switch to
showing only new (unread) messages for that VFolder, or alternately only
showing unreplied messages.

On the topic of unreplied messages, a custom email attribute might come
in useful here to be used instead of "replied". I would find it more
useful to record that an email has been "dealt with". For me, this means
either that I have replied to the email, or I have read it and decided
I'm not going to reply to it. Having this attribute means that I can
easily view all emails that I have not yet dealt with. I can imagine a
new column in the email list view with a toggle which I can click once
I've delt with a message. Replying to a message would automatically flag
the email as "dealt with".


--
Ryan Heise

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