Re: [Geary] Forgiving the user

[Jim Nelson <jim yorba org>]

There's a few issues being described here:

It happened to me a few times to have clicked the "Archive" or "Trash" buttons from the toolbar instead of selecting the message on the top (see the screenshot).

There's been some discussion of moving the Archive/Trash buttons closer to the conversation pane, perhaps next to the search bar.

* If I clicked "Archive", where has my message gone? Geary does not have an "Archived messages" folder. What I generally do is open my browser, open Gmail and search for "-in:inbox -in:sent -in:chats -in:drafts", however this is cumbersome and forces me to use software that I do not want to use to organize my mail.

For Gmail, "All Mail" is essentially the Archive folder.  However, it also shows messages in the Inbox and won't show messages in the Trash, which is the other place you'd need to look.

* If I clicked "Trash", then I'm forced to look in my trash, which is full of drafts. Given that both Geary and Gmail group messages in conversations, distinguishing between drafts and the message I deleted is not that easy (and anyhow it's easier from Gmail).

How is it easier in Gmail?

As I see it, this situation is brought by the following problems:

1. Searching for archived messages is impossible.

I wouldn't say that, it's just that we lack a feature for excluding user-specified folders in the search.

2. Geary pollutes the trash with useless drafts.

<sigh> ... this is actually a Gmail-ism.  Geary deletes drafts when it's through with them, Gmail's IMAP implementation "helpfully" moves them to the Trash.  So, for Geary to properly delete a message, it needs to move it to the Trash and then delete it from the Trash.  This two-step process is something we want: 

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721790

3. Geary does not have an "Undo" button.

This would be my first choice for solving your problem.  It is something we've wanted for some time as well: 

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=721828

4. Geary does not inform the user about what is happening.

What I appreciate of Gmail is that whenever I do a nasty action I am presented with an helpful message like "The conversation has been moved to the Trash. [Learn more] [Undo]". Having the same in Geary would solve problems #3 and #4.

I think this is all valid and important, the question is what we would need to do to best solve the overall issue, mistakenly archiving or trashing a conversation.  I see three tasks coming out of this:

* At least experiment with moving the Trash/Archive buttons (GtkHeaderBar makes this easier to do)

* Implement Undo for Archive/Trash.

* A status message indicating what's happened and indicating that undo is available.

The third is not strictly required, but would be a nice touch for situations where the user does not realize what they've done.

Implementing full delete on Gmail would be nice, but I feel it's kind of side issue to the core problem here.  It would, however, solve other reported issues.

-- Jim