Re: [Geary] inbox zero on non-gmail account

[Federico Bruni <fede inventati org>]

Il giorno lun 16 mar 2015 alle 23:21, Jim Nelson <jim yorba org> ha 
scritto:
> The key things to understand about Geary today is that (a) its IMAP 
> stack supports SPECIAL-USE parameters and flags, and (b) Geary can 
> recognize special-use folders and display them as such (i.e. the 
> folder marked \Drafts by SPECIAL-USE is shown as the Drafts folder in 
> Geary).  That's where we stand.
>
> The first two tickets you link to are tasks to do the following:
>
> #713986: Display the \Archive SPECIAL-USE folder as an Archive folder 
> in Geary, i.e. at the top-level, approximately where the All Mail 
> folder is displayed.

> #712972: When working with an account that has an Archive folder, 
> display the Archive button exactly as Geary does for Gmail.

Ok, actually I thought I could already achieve this in Geary but I see 
that I was wrong.
I've just double-checked and the server has the archive special folder 
configured already. I hope that someone will tackle this in the near 
future and I've added my bounty here:
https://www.bountysource.com/issues/1352603-archive-for-non-gmail-servers


> The two tickets are quite closely related and probably should have 
> been merged some time back.  The work between the two is sizable, 
> which is why I've left them separated.
>
> On top of what I've described, the following work needs to be done:
>
> * When an \Archive folder is detected, offer it to the client as a 
> Geary.ImapEngine folder object that implements the 
> Geary.FolderSupport.Archive interface.  The implementation of that 
> interface should be to move the supplied emails from the folder to 
> the Archive folder (using 
> Geary.ImapEngine.MinimalFolder.move_email_async).
>
> * I suspect many of the people who desire this feature will want 
> Geary to manage their Archive by creating sub-folders named according 
> to email date, i.e. Archive.2015.03.  See Robert Park's comment in 
> #712972.  Because Thunderbird supports this, many people will want 
> Geary to pick up where it left off.  In other words, if we don't do 
> this, many people will still be unsatisfied with Geary's archive 
> support.
>
> This gets even more complicated because, if we support this, we'll 
> need to ensure all the archive subfolders are displayed under the 
> Archive top-level in the sidebar.  And people will want to be able to 
> specify how the archive subfolders are named, i.e. with a strftime 
> string or multiple options.  See Thunderbird's Account Settings for 
> what I'm talking about.
>
> Frankly, I feel like Geary's search capability makes up for such a 
> strict organizational practice, but that's just me I guess.
>
> At the end of the day, this feature is not required to land the other 
> Archive features into Geary, but something that people will ask for 
> at some point.  I'm not terribly excited about going down this path; 
> Geary was not designed to be an end-all mail client that satisfies 
> all people and all workflows.

I totally agree.
Geary has support for IMAP only and this is already something that 
drives many users away, especially Thunderbird users, I believe. So why 
caring too much for those? :-)

IMO a basic archive feature - move all emails in one place only - would 
be enough. The search can help with filtering.


> > Secondly, if I could make archiving work, would I be able to set the 
> > label filtering on the server and still have the archive action 
> > working? In other words, can a thread be marked with a label and be 
> > archived?
>
> Adding a label to an email is making a copy of it in the other 
> folder.  So, if you label an email and then archive it, you're 
> copying it to the label's folder, copying it to the Archive folder, 
> and then deleting the original.  That will work, but unlike Gmail, 
> you'll consume twice as much server space for that email.  (Newer 
> servers might avoid this, I'm not totally up-to-speed on all storage 
> strategies.)

Sure, I think that I read this before but I totally forgot it:
http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Migration/Gmail


> > Finally, another concern for my final switch is the possible lost of 
> > all my emails. As local backup is still an open issue:
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=713832
> >
> > is it possible to recover the emails from geary database and send 
> > them back to the server?
>
> There are no plans for that right now.  Again, if someone wants to 
> tackle it, we'd be happy to consider such a feature, although I 
> highly recommend discussing the design/plans here before jumpin

I read again issue 713832 and I see that this feature is already taken 
into account there:

"Presumably this would also mean allowing the mail to be accessed and
search as though it was present on the server and offering some way to 
push it
back to the server (or a server) to restore it."