Re: [Geary] Disabling Mark as Read Automatically

[Michael Gratton <mike vee net>]

Hey Axel,

On Wed, 30 Jan, 2019 at 12:08 PM, Axel U <ulrich axel gmail com> wrote:
> What I could envision is to toggle between "Mark as read immediately" 
> meaning marking it as read when the conversation is loaded, which is 
> the current behavior and should be the default.  The other option for 
> the toggle is to mark it as read only when any of the following 
> actions on that message is taken: Reply, Reply All, Forward, Archive 
> or Delete (marking it read when deleting is debatable, I would be ok 
> either way).  Any other action like move to folder or apply label 
> also should not mark it as read automatically.  I have no good 
> umbrella term that I can think of what to call that option though.
> Obviously, leave the current function in the message menu to mark the 
> message as read manually in place as is today.

Hmm, interesting approach.

> Regarding the outline in 
> <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=795187>: I prefer not to 
> guess when a message or messages in a conversation is marked as read 
> (combination of how much of it is displayed and a time factor if I 
> understand the proposed approach correctly).  I would prefer an 
> unambiguous setting that makes it very clear when the marking as read 
> happens.

I'm not actually a fan of the "mark after X seconds" approach anymore, 
after experimenting around with it a few days ago for issue #80[0]. The 
goal of that was to ensure auto-mark occurred only as a response to 
people taking some action (selecting a conversation, scrolling an 
already selected conversation, etc). Marking after X seconds would to a 
certain degree go against that again, even if there was an indication 
of how much longer one has before it gets marked as read, and it really 
gets in the way when batch-deleting, etc.

So I really like this idea of having an option to mark as read only on 
some other set of explicit actions. The question of how to apply that 
to a conversation as a whole does come up though. E.g. replying to a 
specific conversation should probably mark all messages above the one 
being replied to - so replying to the conversation as a whole would 
mark all messages as read, but replying to a message half way down 
would only mark the ones above it as read? Would this also apply to 
forwarding? Archiving would mark all messages, presumably. I guess the 
two options in the prefs would be something like the "Mark messages as 
read when displayed" (the current behaviour, and the default) and "Mark 
conversation read when replying, forwarding, or archiving."

> Hope that helps in the design and describes why I would like the 
> option of disabling messages being marked automatically as read.

Yeah, that was really useful, thanks heaps!

//Mike
>


[0] - <<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/geary/issues/80>>

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