Re: [Geary] Feature request: Browse mail by contact panel

[Michael Gratton <mike vee net>]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 12:13 AM, Stephen Michel 
<stephen michel tufts edu> wrote:
> I suggest adding a way to view a list of email addresses that have 
> sent you mail **that is in your inbox** (of any account).

This is an interesting idea, but doesn't considering only conversations 
in your Inbox go against what makes the person-centric view of IM apps 
useful? I.e. that people that you frequently contact are usually closer 
to the top?

Consider people who strictly adhere to Inbox Zero: They would often 
find the contact list completely or mostly empty, reducing its 
usefulness. Others who have Inboxes that are regularly out of control 
(/me waives) would find it full of many contacts anyway, which makes 
limiting it to only the Inbox kind of pointless.

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 1:16 AM, Marvin W <gnome larma de> wrote:
> > As soon as one of the "many" replies, it'll *also* appear under that 
> > person's header, with their replies expanded by default and all 
> > other replies collapsed.
>
> 1. This means that if you have a conversation with, say 20 people, 
> all these 20 people will be on top of you contact panel and you would 
> be required to scroll down for other people? That would be a lot 
> worse than typical instant messengers that show groups as groups.
>
> 2. This also means that an e-mail full of addresses in the from-field 
> (rfc 822 allows multiple addresses in the from-field) will cause the 
> contact panel to be cluttered as well? Or how would you handle such 
> an e-mail originated from three persons?

One way to address this might be to apply Geary's existing autocomplete 
prioritising to the contact list, which considers not only addresses 
you have received mail from, but addresses you have sent mail to. So in 
the case of mailing lists, people you have sent mail to would be sorted 
above people who have only sent mail to you via the list. Taking into 
account frequency of contact would help further.

If this was the case, then the scope of the contacts view could 
potentially widened to include not only just those conversations in the 
Inbox, but also Drafts, Sent and Archive. In fact, ordering contacts 
based on which mailbox(es) they have messages in might also be another 
criteria to sort on.

//Mike

--
⊨ Michael Gratton, Percept Wrangler.
⚙ <http://mjog.vee.net/>