Re: [Evolution] Newer mail in a folder hint (mail count is not enough)

[Adam Gibson <agibson ptm com>]

Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 12:11 -0500, Adam Gibson wrote:
>
> > One thing that is keeping me from using evolution is a feature that I am 
> > having trouble finding an equivalent for that Thunderbird has.  When you 
> > have a bunch of unread mail in an imap folder(not everyone has time to 
> > read them all) and new mail comes in on that folder a * will be placed 
> > next to the folder to let you know that new mail has arrived since you 
> > last looked at that folder.
> >
> > I tend to have a bunch of folders with unread mail(subjects are not 
> > interesting enough to look at yet or just not enough time or whatever) 
> > so it is nice to have some kind of hint that new mail has arrived.  Just 
> > increasing the folder mail count is not enough because I can not 
> > remember dozens of folders worth of mail counts which caused me to have 
> > to scan every folder 1 by 1 every once in awhile to see if new mail has 
> > arrived.
> >
> > Does evolution have a feature somewhere that can be enabled that gives 
> > this functionality?  I would really like to use evolution because of the 
> > calendar integration with the gnome desktop but this one feature is 
> > really hard to live without with my mail usage.
>
>
> Asterisks?  Attached is my folder tree, and as you can see, it is
> very easy to determine which folders have unread emails in them,
> and how many there are.

The problem is not knowing if there are any unread mail(the count works 
for that)... the problem is knowing if there are any *new* mail since 
the last time that you were in that folder regardless of unread/read 
mail that are already in the folder.  When you have tons of email 
folders and email to go through I tend to leave mail unread for subjects 
I do not care about because it would take way too much of my time to 
read them all or mark them as read.  Unread and new mail are not the 
same thing.  I could have 100 unread emails from months ago but get a 
new mail in the folder now.

For example... If you have 30 unread mail messages in a mailing list 
folder called folderA that you are looking at and then click on a 
different folder called folderB and leave your main view in folderB for 
awhile, it is extremely handy to have an asterisk appear next to folderA 
when a new message arrives in folderA to make you well aware that new 
mail has arrived in the folder you are not looking at.  The only way for 
you to know it currently is if you keep track of all the folder counts. 
 When you have 50 folders it is extremely difficult to know which 
folders have new mail when there are messages left in the folder as 
unread.