[imp] imp questions (usability issues)

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Jeff Tucker <jefft@wciatl.com>:

> 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.

All right, then. Here's some feedback, and I'll cross my fingers and hope for 
diffs. ;)

> 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.

This sounds like it would be another good preference.

> - 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.

It sounds like it might be a good idea to add an option to a filter for whether 
or not to expunge after running it, or a general option to expunge after 
running all filters.

> 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.

I'd be interested to know why this doesn't work for filters; the filtering code 
calls the IMP_Message::delete method, which should obey the trash folder 
preference.

> - 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.

This should be added.

> - 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.

Hmm. Not sure why that doesn't work, though it might have to do with the 
imap_search stuff. Max, any luck with this?

> - 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.

If you can test these and make sure they work with the imap_search code, go for 
it.

> 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.

When a folder is closed is a pretty vague idea (programatically) from a webmail 
client. And purging all folders, as you note, isn't a good option. So you're 
saying that if the filter deletion obeyed trash folder settings, this would be 
a non-issue?

> 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.

This has been planned since when I first specced out the EXPAND_NAMES option; 
it just hasn't been implemented yet. It should be done.

> 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 for the feedback! Hopefully I'll have some more time soon to tackle some 
of this, and hopefully I'll get some help at that. ;)

-chuck

--
Charles Hagenbuch, <chuck@horde.org>
"What was and what may be lie, like children whose faces we cannot see, in 
the arms of silence. All we ever have is here, now." - Ursula K. Le Guin