[Evolution] Re: [Evolution-hackers] Feature request summary 1/27

[Jens Lautenbacher <jtl schlund de>]

Not Zed <notzed ximian com> writes:

> > - Evolution should not collapse mail threads with new unread messages in them.
> > (Christophe Lambin <clambin easynet be>)
>
>
> it only collapses threads the user wanted to collapse.  Does this mean
> it should uncollapse some automatically? that behaviour seems erratic at
> best.
>
>
> > - New unread messages added to hidden threads should remain hidden.
> > (Rodd Clarkson <rodd redfishbluefish com au>)
>
>
> I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, this is what it does now? 
> Isn't this opposing the one above?

What gnus can do (and I use very much) is this: In a folder, read mail
isn't shown by default, only unread mail. But if there is a new unread
mail that belongs to a thread which is already read, the whole part of
the thread from the unread up to the root (so not neccessarily all
sibling parts) becomes visible again. So you always have the context
for new mail at hand, without wasting space with all the old mails.

What evolution needs is to set certain criteria on a per folder basis:
E.g. 

* Show all/only unread mail; 

* being able to say: all read messages in this folder should be
                     automatically expunged after xxx time and  
                     stuff like that.   

* Show threads / unthreaded / collapsed threads

What should never happen is, that a new message could be hidden in a
collapsed thread. I'm not really sure if evo should uncollapse the
thread or only mark the root as pseudo-unread or another visual clue?
I personally don't use collapsed views at all (I "collapse" by the means
of hiding the read stuff). 

On a related note, another very nice feature in gnus is the Gcc: header
(maybe I'm biased as I wrote this part a long time ago...) which lets
me put my replies into a selected folder. of course this is setteable
on a per folder basis, too, but the default of course is to put it
into the "originating" folder.

And the third feature whose absence will bite me strongly in the
future with evolution is that gnus automatically does "the right thing"
when I press follow-up: in a normal mail folder it makes a reply, but
if the folder stores a mailing list (or, better, if the mail I reply
to comes from a mailing list) it posts to the mailing list instead
(nntp works of course, too)

These little but nice features allow me to operate almost
transparently on mailing lists and normal folders: I just make sure
that I set the Gcc: header only in normal mail folders, as for mailing
lists my own mail will be reflected to me (at least that's the case
with 99.9% of all mailing lists), so I have the addded control if my
mail dind't hang somewhere in these lists.
 

Some additional notes:

Most of the stuff I say is of course in comparison to gnus, which
still seems to be the most complete mail and news package I've ever
encountered --- unfortunately you need to put all other studies to a
halt for several weeks if you want to configure it from start. and the
nice graphical stuff has it's limitations due to the emacs
environment.

For my personal use, the points evolution misses to make me switch
over are:

folder operations (delete, move)

folder local preferences as said above, maybe even like in gnus, where
you can set preferences for a folder and all it's subfolders (this
works by the separation of folders into topics and groups: I don't
know if this would be overkill in evo)

and most importantly: Show X-faces!


regards,
        and keep up the good work,
                                        jtl