imp questions (usability issues)

[Jeff Tucker]

Hi,

As a relatively new imp admin, I've been playing with the various features. 
I have some questions and comments about usability. For one thing, I want 
to make sure I have it set up correctly. But I also want to make some 
comments as a new user, perhaps not someone who has gotten used to the 
quirks of the package and doesn't notice them any more.

No need to tell me "Patches?". I'm perfectly willing to do that. I just 
want to make sure that I'm doing things optimally to start with and that 
these aren't impossible or impractical ideas.

FILTERS
- It's non-intuitive to me that I have to manually apply the filters. It 
would be nice if every time the mail Inbox display was generated, the 
filters were applied. When I login, my "imp" filter gets applied but never 
again unless I click a button. I'd like to see the filter applied when the 
Inbox refreshes to show new mail, or when I return to the Inbox from 
somewhere else.

- I haven't been able to figure out a reasonable (IMO) way to handle 
filters and deleted messages. When I enter my mailbox, it might say I have 
44 new messages. 25 of those are imp messages which have actually already 
been deleted from my Inbox, yet they still show up (as deleted). So, when I 
login, I invariably have to "Purge Deleted" first to get my Inbox to a 
reasonable view.

Now, I tried setting delete mail to actually move to Trash. This works for 
mail delete by clicking delete, but doesn't work for filtered mail. So, I 
end up with the same problem. I thought about setting up "Hide Deleted". 
However, it's not clear to me that those messages will EVER get purged. 
After a month, I could end up with 1000 deleted imp messages hiding in my 
Inbox.

On further investigation, it appears that when I delete manually any 
message from my Inbox, with "move to trash" turned on that imp does a 
delete->purge operation on Inbox. That means that my filtered emails stay 
in my inbox (deleted) until I delete any OTHER message, and then they 
disappear. So, a combination of "move to trash" and "hide deleted messages" 
would probably have the effect I want, but it's a little non-intuitive.

- When I click on Options->Filters->Edit my Filters, I get to a screen with 
no visible way back except the toolbar on top. All the other Options 
screens have a "Return to Options" button.

- I couldn't find an obvious way to filter on the string "[imp]". I can 
filter on "imp" but that matches "import" and other words. Should the 
filter allow non-alphabetic characters? If it already does, should this be 
added to the Help for that line? I tried "[imp]", [imp], \[imp\], but none 
worked.

- It would be nice if I could filter on a couple more fields. I know 
everyone will have their own personal list, but I think Sender and 
Mailing-List would cover most situations I can see. Many mailing lists do 
not put their name in the Subject line and I really like filters to put 
mailing list traffic into its own folders.

DELETED MESSAGES
- I personally understand IMAP and how it works regarding deleted messages, 
but I don't expect all my users to. It would be nice if there were a 
maintenance selection to automatically purge all deleted messages from a 
folder when that folder is closed. Or to purge from all folders when you 
login (although some people have hundreds of folders). Then again, if 
filtering worked the way I expected, there would never be deleted messages 
in a folder. That's probably best from the standpoint of non-technical 
users.

ADDRESSBOOK
- I won't put any Turba issues here, because I realize that's a separate 
project. But, when sending an email, it would be very nice if the names on 
the To: field were auto-expanded before the mail was sent. It's confusing 
to a user who is used to just emailing "mom" or whatever to have to 
remember to click that button. It's especially bad if that user actually 
exists locally, which means their email gets sent to the wrong person.


Thanks for all the great work. I actually do look forward to contributing 
in the future. I hope y'all won't take this as a big list of complaints. I 
LOVE many of the features and it's obvious a lot of time has been taken 
getting things right.

Thanks
Jeff


-- 
Jeff Tucker
Williams Consulting, Inc.
jefft@wciatl.com