Re: [Evolution] Folder-specific Threaded option

[Jens Lautenbacher <jtl schlund de>]

[First of all, sorry for the long mail]

Not Zed <notzed ximian com> writes:

> On 16 May 2001 18:50:43 +0200, Jens Lautenbacher wrote:
> > Also the UI for these Options is very strange, for "Hide Read
> > messages" you have the menu entry, but there is no check mark when
> > it's selected, to unselect you have to select "Show all"... and this
> > state is folder local... UI from hell :-(
>
> No the ui is correct.  Hide read messages is not a state, its an action. 
> i.e. it just hides CURRENTLY read messages.  It doesn't keep hiding
> newly read messages.

Oh come on, that's even worse. I have a folder with 1000 msg. I hide 990
of them, then I read 5 of the remaining 10. Now on subsequent entering
of the folder I have not a single feedback from UI that there are
"older" read messages that are hidden. This _is_ UI from hell. 

The problem is that you seem to store the attribute of being hidden on
a per mail basis. But what a lot of people would like to see is a
folder attribute that means: "Don't show me read mails in this
folder". All messages i read after entering such a folder will be
marked read, and, after I come back, won't  be shown.

The accumulative way you implemented seems to be a way to just move
"uninteresting older mails" out of sight. But when I have a big
folder, with a mix of a lot of read messages, some unread (aka new)
messages and a real big bunch of hidden messages, I run into problems
when I want to see such a hidden msq. I do a Show all, poff, all of
them are there. But now how can I hide them again? Hide read will hide
all of the read ones, which is not what I wanted.

What makes more sense to me is a mix of attributes that belong to
certain messages (like flag as important, flag as unimportant, or even
levels of importance) and attributes that belong to the view of a
folder (like "do always show important messages, regardless of if they
are read or not", "do not show unimportant messages", and of course
the most important "do not show read messages" or even better "do not
show read messages that have no descendants [in the sense of how a
threading option would sort them] that are unread")

What you call "hiding" is in fact a flagging as "somehow unimportant"
plus the fact that the folder does't show those. But what you call
"show all" is unfortunately a "remove the unimportant flag". Instead
it should be "show all, even if they are flagged as unimportant". That
way, on subsequent entries, the flag persists and I will (to come back
to my example above) see again just 10 messages, with 5 of them marked
as read (of course only if I have _not_ set the hypothetical folder option
of hiding read mails).
 
        jtl