[maemo-developers] Modest/TinyMail problems (continue from the blog comments)

[From: Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 00:57 +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 11:24:24PM +0200, Andrea Grandi wrote:
> > I continue here a discussion you can find in this post:
> > http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2008/06/24/big-day-for-modest-and-tinymail
> > (Just read the comments).
> <snip>
> > Please let me know what do you think about it.
> 
> I want all the messages, and I want them in threaded view.  I believe
> Modest does the former, but not the latter.

Although threaded view is a UI problem for Modest to solve, ain't
Tinymail passing the necessary info to Modest so that it could do
threading. At this moment.

That's because the UI doesn't support it and because the info required
for threading (the references headers) consume more bandwidth. If the UI
ain't going to use it, then why request it, right?

It's however relatively easy to let Tinymail pass it to Modest. We could
also request THREAD if the IMAP server supports this capability (which
relatively few IMAP servers don't) and build the threading very quickly
this way (less analysis and calculating would need to be performed by
the device, as the server would solve it entirely).


Both would be relatively simple to do.

What would be more difficult would be to write a GtkTreeModel that uses
this extra info to also represent it in a Tree rather than a flat list.

I'm also not convinced that a device with such a small screen could
provide a useful view when threaded.

I think grouping E-mails together based on "discussion", so basically a
one-level Tree instead of a multi-threaded threaded view with each reply
recursively going deeper ... I believe that makes a lot more sense.

For example:

[-] From My Boss, about "Your resignation letter"
.+-- Your resignation letter from My Boss
.+-- RE: Your resignation letter from My Boss
.+-- RE: Your resignation letter from My Boss
.`-- RE: Your resignation letter from My Boss

Rather than


[-]-- Your resignation letter from My Boss
....[-]-- RE: Your resignation letter from My Boss
........[-]-- RE: Your resignation letter from My Boss
.............`-- RE: Your resignation letter from My Boss

Note that I used dots to indicate the amount of loss screen space in
both UI solutions.

And let's be honest ... does the second UI solution solve that much more
of the problem you try to solve. 

Also if it's a tablet that you are unlikely going to be using for
handling more than ten mails per day and that functions as your
secondary E-mail client (your primary is either KMail, Evolution,
Outlook or Thunderbird, right?).


Anyway, join Tinymail's mailing list if you want to discuss the service-
side of the story. The UI side is always going to be a Modest's team
decision. Best way to ping those people is to make a bug for Maemo in
the product "Mail" or "Modest" (I forgot which is being used atm).

http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/tinymail-devel-list


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be